Category: Kids and Learning

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Stuff and Nonsense

I was watching a Toronto breakfast show the other morning called BT, in which they ran a story about a school being selected to be part of a $15,000 classroom makeover competition. The school was Philip Pocock Secondary School and the live cross to the school on the morning show presented the story in a typical teaser fashion… you know how it goes, “coming up after the break, we show you the amazing results of a classroom makeover…”

Of course, this caught my attention. As an educationalist, and particularly one who is interested in the ways in which schools need to change to become more relevant to our 21st century students, I was keen to see what sorts of things had been done to give this classroom a makeover. As the show cut to an ad break, my mind was running wild with questions… What sort of cool, innovative things have they done to this classroom? What could you do to a learning space that might better engage our digital natives in the learning process? What cutting edge technologies would we see built into the room? How would they take the concept of digital convergence – bringing together audio, video, the web, interactivity, and all the other digital technologies that our students need in order to function – and bring these together in new and amazing ways, helping to define the direction of the classrooms of the future.

After the break, they showed a bunch of photos of the classroom in its old, industrial age state… it looked much the same as so many other classrooms around the world. Rows of desks lined up facing a blackboard. No digital tools embedded into the architecture. Just a typical boring classroom that most baby boomers would instantly recognise as their version of “school”. The TV cameras showed Janina, the host of the live segment, standing outside the room building up the tension and excitement with a group of students who waited anxiously to enter the room and experience this bold new learning environment…

So, what would you expect if you were to enter this classroom? What types of tools, toys and technologies would YOU want in there? If you accept that technology plays a part in learning, what would you require in the room to ensure you could deliver the very best 21st century education to your students? How would you want the classroom technologies to enable that room to extend beyond its own physical boundaries and let you and your students tap into cultural diversity, live global information, expert opinion and authentic learning experiences? There is SO much that could be done to a classroom these days that would move it towards these end goals… I was really interested to see what they’d actually done.

There is always a lot of talk about the sorts of roles that technology can play in creating “the classrooms of tomorrow”. And although the real benefits of any sorts of learning technologies will come from the ways in which insightful and creative teachers are able to use these tools to engage and inspire their students, I am just as intrigued by the part the actual physical learning environment plays in achieving these goals, and the drivers behind the design of schools. So it was with some interest that I watched as the BT reporter flung the door open to reveal the magical classroom makeover.

What I saw made me both sad and angry. Sad that a school had a chance to make a difference to a classroom – even just one single classroom, and they blew it. And angry because the pathetic excuse for a “makeover” was getting so much hoo-ha on TV, and that the people behind the makeover were obviously so damn clueless.

The revolution in the classroom at Philip Pocock school? They painted the walls a nice lime green colour, got some new furniture from Ikea, replaced the blackboard with a whiteboard (not an interactive one, just a regular whiteboard) and stuck a TV/DVD in the corner of the classroom. Oh, and put a computer on the teacher’s desk. I was stunned. They had to be kidding me… This 21st century classroom was just an 18th century classroom with a coat of paint and some new furniture! the desks were all still arranged in rows facing the teacher at the front of the class. The technology was still not in the hands of the students, and the classroom was just as isolated from the outside world as it was previously.

The reporter started interviewing the kids about their reaction to the room and they all were saying how “cool” it looked and how much “better they would be able to learn”. Pleassse!!! I could not get over how shortsighted and silly they looked as they waffled on about how wonderful it was. Nothing had changed, not in any sort of fundamental way. It was all just cosmetic. Nothing would change in that classroom with regard to learning or teaching.

I’m telling you, we need a bloody revolution!

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The Real World

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I’m sitting in one of our school computer labs at the moment supervising students working on the computers. We open our labs for lunchtime a few days a week so the students can use the computers, presumably to catch up on “work”.

And what do these kids – our teenage digital natives – do when the get unrestricted free access to the school computers? Just looking around the room right now and seeing what they’re up to reveals the following… more than half of them are working on their Bebo pages, a few are looking through their MySpace accounts and a couple seem to be just browsing through websites for song lyrics and anime cartoons. There are two kids checking their email, using Yahoo!Mail and Hotmail, and one is browsing through a collection of digital photos she took at the school swimming carnival last Friday.

Oh, and one had a Publisher document open that looked vaguely like it could have been a school task, but I could be wrong. It may have been a party invitation.

Is it any wonder school seems so irrelevant?

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Stuck in the Past

My school has recently created a new teaching space. We were short of classrooms, and the idea was hatched to enclose an open undercroft area and turn it into a classroom. It was a great idea, and a really good lateral thinking solution. When I first saw the new room, the thing that I loved immediately about it was that the whole back wall was entirely made of glass doors, effectively giving an open view of the classroom to the outside and the outside in. Although it didn’t open up onto some beautiful view, it did mean that the people walking past the room were able to see in, making the activity in that room far more transparent, if you’ll excuse the pun.

On closer inspection, I was amazed that the room – a new classroom created in early 2007 – had not been wired for data points, had not been fitted with wifi, had not had a provision for an interactive whiteboard or a ceiling mounted data projector. The furniture that had been ordered for the room consisted of single desks and chairs, arranged in rows, just like every other classroom. In short, there was almost no thought given to this space as a 21st century learning space. This was a classroom that was following the exact same paradigm of classroom “design” that has been around for the last hundred years.

I think what I found the most depressing about this is the blind way in which we accept that classrooms are the way they are because that’s the way they’ve always been. The world has changed incredibly in the last decade, and especially in the last 5 years. The world has become flattened, as we keep hearing. Communication, collaboration, working in teams, kids as digital natives, outsourcing, sharing ideas… these are all part of the new information landscape, but we still design classrooms using an industrial age model of learning – children sitting in rows, teacher at the front, with no integrated infrastructure for supporting a connection to the outside world of people and ideas.

I’m sure we will address this issue.  I’m sure we will eventually get the room cabled, add some wifi, maybe an IWB, and whatever else we need.  Almost certainly, it will cost more to do it afterwards than it would have cost to do it while the room was under construction.  But the point is that we had a chance to really think about what a classroom space could be and we blew it.  The tragedy of this is not that the room is less than it could have been… the tragedy is that our thinking about education and our receptiveness to creating the sort of environment we want for our kids to learn in was so much less than it could have been.  We have not internalised what it means to be a 21st century school.  We still think like a 1950s school, and even though we might eventually throw lots of technology at the problem, our basic thinking will always let our 21st century students down unless we change it.

And that beautiful glass wall at the back of the room, the only redeeming feature of the space?  It was covered in matte finish coating, blocking the transparency of the glass and visually acting as a normal solid wall.  Yes, a real lack of transparency.