Biology is Life!

On Monday of this week, while taking part in the Elluminate Session for my PLP cohort, I had this moment of clarity; I had finally come to an understanding of the goals of this professional development endeavor of Powerful Learning Practice.  It  was much more than learning about the benefits of using Web 2.0 technology in the classroom.  It was about understanding how Web 2.0 can be used to develop personal learning networks and that as educators we need to teach our students about how to use the internet for their own personal learning growth rather than just as a tool for socializing with friends.  The we need to teach them beyond the tools.  We need to teach them how to use the internet wisely.  Initally the idea of the PLP program facinated me.  I was going to begin to think critically about education and make my classroom a more meaningful place of learning, but in the first part of the program I felt lost in a sea of information and web 2.0 tools.  We had projects and assignments to do, but I had been failing to see how these things would be able to help me to think critically about the nature of education, teaching, and learning and I been flailing about, trying to stay afloat and finish the PLP program successfully, but just when I had been about to let myself begin to sink, as the elluminate session started on Monday, I spotted my rescue team.  They talked about how to create meaningful PLNs and all of a sudden these ideas just started rushing into my head.  The goal had never been for the web 2.0 tools to revolutionize education, but that the tools were a way to help the kids to begin to understand how to create their own meaningful personal learning networks.  The web was about moving education beyond the physical classroom, beyond teacher-driven instruction, and moving toward student-centered learning opportunities and using passions and common interests to drive the development of the learning networks.   Since Monday, I started thinking about how to incorporate the idea of helping the students to develop PLNs into my instruction, how to use their passions to drive the learning process in Biology. 

I have a student who is really smart, but doesn’t always get into the projects that I assign to the class, but does pretty well on tests and asks really impressive questions during class.  So,  I met with him today, and I asked him what he really wanted to know about Photosynthesis and Cellular Respiration.  Ultimately he wanted to know about how the processes of photosynthesis and cellular respiration could be applied.  We had great conversations about Algae in the fuel industry and alcoholic fermentation in the beer industry.  He’s researching these two processes and experiments that he personally can conduct to learn more about each process.  He and I will continue to meet to help him to develop meaningful PLNs.  Ultimates, he wants to create a photoblog to document what he’s learning and to use a flip camera to teach his classmates about what he learned from his research, which he will post to our class wiki site and a discussion involving all three of my Biology sections will follow.  If all goes well, it is my hope that I will be able to allow all of my students do something like this to allow them to have more meaningful learning experiences within the Biology class.  I want them to learn what matters most to them rather than having me decide on what I should lecture about, have them decide what is important and have them teach each other. 

That’s the hope.  It’s a work in progress and one concern is, with this way of learning, how does meaningful assessment and feedback take place?  A test just doesn’t seem meaningful and doesn’t seem to provide the right kind of feedback and if a test is really not necessarily the way to assess, then how do I adequately prepare them for their future education – especially if Science is their future?  Tests are the primary method of assessment in college science courses…

In an attempt to finish the Pre-game Plays that I had skipped, I’m blogging about the benefits of using social bookmarks.  It was interesting to the various numbers of people who had bookmarked pages that I had looked at.  This could be great in determining just how useful that particular site is.  I could also see the value in using the social bookmarks in being able to go in and search certain tags to find some useful websites rather than having to go through and search all of the websites yourself.  You’re not sorting through as much crap on the internet because others have in a sense done that for you in bookmarking those sites.  I also think it’s nice to have one spot for all of your bookmarks that can be accessed by any computer.

In terms of personal application.  I was looking up lab ideas for exploring the properties of water and it was great that I could bookmark sites and pick and choose the activities from each of those sites that worked for me and I could go back and look at them on my own terms and didn’t have to try to remember what my search terms had been.

Blogs can be intense… I’m subscribed to Sheryl’s blog from PLP and holy man does she have a ton of stuff to say!   I don’t know how I can read all of that stuff, it’s definitely too much!  I couldn’t actually get through the blog, but…

I did end up reading a pretty facinating blog that one of my former education professors from UNH had posted on her facebook page.   The title had jumped out at me, and I felt like I had to read, so I did and and as I read it, it didn’t feel like work to me, as reading some of the other blogs did.  I decided to subscribe to the blog.

Here’s the entry: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-29/education-crisis-why-testing-and-firing-teachers-doesnt-work/

I got pretty fired up about it…  What do you all think about it?  How can we improve education?  I was talking with my partner, specifically comparing my experiences in public education and private education, I was saying how different it was teaching the students in the inner city.  They have such difficult backgrounds and a large majority of the students have delays in their social, moral, and emotional development as a result of poverty and the neighborhoods in which they live. Lots of students have  parents who are struggling to make ends meet and the kids are often left by themselves to deal with life, as their parents are working several jobs and are not a strong positive force in their lives.  Last year I went to two graduation ceremonies – my current school’s (a private school) and my former school (an urban public school): There was a distinct difference in the maturity of the students.  I was looking at the kids that my current school had graduated and there was a stark difference between these student and some of the top students in my former school, and it made me think about the fact that the schools where students have difficult living situations and needs, must have structures in place for helping students have more positive emotional development, and that this must happen from the very beginning (K – 12th), so that  can have strategies in place to allow them to focus more meaningfully on their educations.  They can make more positive choices about how and when they will study, and have strategies in place for dealing with the bad things in their lives.  Without these strategies, how on earth are they going to be successful on a standardized test and how is the government going to try to assess teachers by using standardized test scores when there’s so much more to a student’s life than learning the material.  What do we do?  How do we help the students who have difficult lives, to learn and be successful, well-functioning human-beings?  How do we assess this?  Is it fair to assess teachers by standardized test scores?  How do we tell if a teacher is a good teacher? 

Back to the original topic of the blog: It seems that we need to find blogs that are meaningful to us, ellicit a firey passion within us, make us think, and that don’t feel like work.  I found this particular blog through the power of facebook.  I also found some interesting stuff on twitter.  We just need to look at the people who have well-established social networks and common interests and use them for inspiration on where to begin with using Web 2.0 technologies and making meaningful choices about what we look at on the internet. 

So what gets you all fired up?

Last year I started using a wiki for my classes and I’ve been trying to figure out how to make it a meaningful place of learning for the students.  I want it to be a place of collaboration and reflection, but I’m not quite sure how to organize it and/or how to get the kids to use it more effectively.  I want them to explore the site and see what it has to offer, but it seems that they struggle to do that on top of trying to learn about the Biology that I am teaching them. 

In this collaborative online classroom experience I’m also trying to figure out how to teach them how to “pull their own weight.”  I believe that teachers who assign”regular” classroom group work, struggle to get the students to be truly collaborate.  We frequently see some students sitting back and letting the others do the work and/or other students not having faith and trust in the other group members to get the work done.  So how do I help my students to move away from this.  How do I teach them how to collaborate more effectively and how can I make sure that each student is doing their fair share of the work?  I believe in collaborative education, I just want to make sure that I’m teaching it the right way.  So I’d especially like to use my time in the PLP program to learn how to use the Web 2.0 technology more effectively so that my students can really understand what true collaboration is all about.  There’s so much potential here, and I need to understand what that potential is so that I can start releasing it into my classroom and the students can begin to see what this technology can do for their future.

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