Digital Nativity

I was in the plane today travelling to Ottawa multi-tasking: listening to the It’s Elementary Ed Tech Talk podcast and trying to settle my two year old daughter into a much needed nap. The discussion was about getting kindergarten students to blog. The teacher was saying that the students found the wand microphones intimidating and that headphones with a microphone worked better. Another participant suggested using an mp3 player as a voice recorder.

I thought that using an mp3 player as a portable voice recorder was a great idea – but not just for class. Last Thrusday our grade 7’s went on a field trip to the Calgary Zoo. I’d been there the week before with my sister-in-law, her boyfirend and my daughter while my wife and son were in Saskatoon at a wedding. We had a great day at the zoo; we went in the late afternoon and the animals were all active. Plus there were a couple of very cute babies. I enjoyed that trip to the zoo more than any other I had been on for years. I came home really excited about having seen the animals. What if our grade 7’s could have the ability to record their thoughts and feelings at the moment they were most vivid? With mp3 players, students could record what they saw easily at the same time as it was happening: not the worksheet kind of recording, where they jot down details, writing on each other’s backs or copying information over lunch, but personal reflections and realizations as they happened.

So my first idea was to put together a kit of 4 mp3 players that work as voice recorders and 4 older digital cameras (2-3 mega-pixel, but capable of recording small videos clips) that could accompany students on field trips. Teachers could assign specific observations or reflections in different places (visit the lions – observe them for 3 minutes – make a recording that describes the time of day, the climatic conditions and their behaviour, or take a photo of the machine that prints the newspapers). Students could return to school and prepare multimedia reports or presentations of their field experiences.

I was lying in bed, thinking of this and how I might get the school to come up with the money to put it together. I got to imagining where else we might go. Not far from us is Head-Smashed-in-Buffalo-Jump – the colourfully names site where first nations people would hunt by herding buffaloes over the edge of a cliff . Then the next step in this idea came to me: I’d like my students to be the field reporters for a group of students who cannot get to a place like Head-Smashed-in.

Students from somewhere far away who were also studying Native American Cultures could prepare for the field trip with us and help to create a list of questions and goals to pursue at the site. We would take these to the site an be the field research team, recording the site guided by the larger group’s curiosities. After our visit, we’d prepare a report on the trip and meet up again online with the distant school to discuss what we learned, what was clear and what was still puzzling.

Has anyone done this?

It’s happened a couple of times.  I’ve been out with students and the music needs to be tended to.  The call goes out, “Does anyone have a CD to listen to?”  The answer, silence.  None o the kids have CD players anymore.  Their music is on mp3 players or their cell phones.  Now when I was in grade 7, no one had a portable CD player.  They either weren’t being sold, or they were too expensive.  But then again, no car or bus had a CD player either.

I wasn’t too surprise that not a single student (out of 40) had a CD.  All my CDs have been stacked on the spindles that my blank CDs and DVDs came on.  I never use them anymore.   But, our middle school principal was surprised.

That’s just one example of how digital media has changed the way we entertain ourselves. I’d like to take a closer look along with a couple groups students  at different ages (grade4/5, and 8/9) at how they feel their lives – academic, social and leisure- are affected by the ease and speed of digital information.

This year, I have moved over from being a language arts and social studies teacher to being a computer teacher.  I taught langauge for ten years, and slowly added more and more technology to my classroom methods.  Then a chance came along for me and my wife to move to a little independent school in a wonderful little mountain town.  We took it and I have become the technology department.

Up to now, I have only taught middle and high school students.  Now, I’ve got kindergarten to grade 9, the range of our school.    So far, school is wonderful.  The kids are all so eager to get on the computers.  Even the little people have been good to me so far.  I was very nervous about running classes with very small people.   So far the kindgergarden and grades one and two students have been making pictures and group signs with Tux Paint.  Grades three and four have started off with some publishing of poems and signs with Word.  Grade five has begun to practice some keyboarding skills on the BBC site Dance Mat Typing.  They absolutley love it. It’s hosted by an unusual set of characters – it begins with a goat with a Scottish accent that cheers them along.  Some students run up to me each day to tell me how far they have progressed at home.  The grade sixes are getting started on Chris Craft’s Life ‘Round Here project.  The grade sevens began with a bit of online safety that was inspired by an idea from Clarence Fisher in Snow Lake.  The grade eights and nines take computers together.  They have been setting up Google Readers and blogs on learnerblogs.

One of my goals for this year is to get every class I teach collaborating with another class somewhere else.

My biggest issue is equipment.  Our school did not run a computer program last year and the equipment that we had was old the year before that when it was piled in the room to gather dust.   I managed to weed the collection down to the very best of the worst.  We’ve got three machines that run Windows XP, two that run Windows 2000 (slowly) and five that still run Windows 98.  I had to get rid of all the Macs. They were the same ones that I saw some university using as a doorstop.

That’s it.  It’s time for bed and I have made my first professional blog post.