Are we really witnessing a Revolution?
In his article Come the Revolution, Thomas L. Friedman quotes Andrew Ng as saying, “I normally teach 400 students,” but last semester he taught 100,000 in an online course on machine learning. “To reach that many students before,”…“I would have had to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years.” This to me speaks of revolution.
I really enjoyed Andrew’s quote, “Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary.” So many of us teachers are desperate to get away from the ‘19th Century learning model’, but have no idea how to go about doing that. We also know that there are technologies out there that will make this possible but have no idea how to access those resources within the frameworks provided to us (slow school servers, outdated computers, inconsistent home support).
I am not sure how to do it yet, but I really liked Andrew’s concept of having really good questions ‘voted up’, and ‘not so good’ questions being voted down. I think if I was able to do this in my classroom it would challenge students to write better responses and pose richer questions.
In the articles provided to us on ‘Flipped’ classrooms, I was intrigued by the provision of arguments of both sides. In Janet Steffenhagen’s article on ‘Magic and Controversy’, she has addressed some of the concerns that teachers have expressed about this new model including lack of home computers and a fear of ‘too much homework’.
Again, in the blog posting entitled User Generated Education, Jackie Gerstein talks about the app gap and her hesitancy to focus on a method of delivery that is not necessarily available to all levels of society. Her activities on ‘Photo and/or Video Examples of Real Life Situations’ are given out with the ‘suggestion’ to use mobile devices but in no way require those devices as part of the criteria. I personally spend much of my time asking for devices to be put away. They are always so excited and delighted when I do allow them the option to listen to their devices during a designated work block.
I consider myself to be a project based teacher. I consider myself to be a teacher that allows students to work at their own pace. The one major stick in my craw has been the topic of Mathematics. I have not yet found a system that allows me to send some students off on a wild exploratory math related project while I sit with the lower end students and work with them on mastering the basics. This is the reason why I am so excited to hear and learn more about Salman Khan’s work. His explanation of his work, his critic’s thoughts, and his hopes for his program’s future inspire me greatly.
This year, more than any year passed, I have seen that my grade six Math students cannot handle me speaking to them on a topic. Fifty percent of them cannot repeat to me what I just said thirty seconds ago. It has forced me to look at other options for getting the concepts into their brains. I have tried giving them the textbook and saying, “You will teach Exponents to another set of students in three days and you will write them a quiz.” This was very challenging yet in the end very successful.
Salman’s humour and calm nature, as proven in his TED talk, are quite similar to how I think, or would like to think, that I am in my own classroom. I have used Camtasia to create tutorials for my students as well as introduce a topic when I know I will have a TOC in my room. (It really freaks them out when you are there, but not really there) As he states, I want to be enjoying my class time with my students. I want to be joking with them and exploring with them. Whether students are listening to a video or podcast the night before, or even during class time, this type of format allows us teachers to work one-on-one with our students and that is certainly not what the ‘19th Century Model’ was designed to do.
What I found to be a similarity with each of these articles and videos was that they were either providing an argument for two sides or they were giving their opinion on why alternate methods past or present were not up to par.
So, is this a revolution? Damn straight. Pardon ma français. It is the revolution I know that I have been looking for since I got into this profession ten years ago. I can only hope that we get through this revolution without any of the traditional beheadingsJ
Andrew
In his article Come the Revolution, Thomas L. Friedman quotes Andrew Ng as saying, “I normally teach 400 students,” but last semester he taught 100,000 in an online course on machine learning. “To reach that many students before,”…“I would have had to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years.” This to me speaks of revolution.
I really enjoyed Andrew’s quote, “Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary.” So many of us teachers are desperate to get away from the ‘19th Century learning model’, but have no idea how to go about doing that. We also know that there are technologies out there that will make this possible but have no idea how to access those resources within the frameworks provided to us (slow school servers, outdated computers, inconsistent home support).
I am not sure how to do it yet, but I really liked Andrew’s concept of having really good questions ‘voted up’, and ‘not so good’ questions being voted down. I think if I was able to do this in my classroom it would challenge students to write better responses and pose richer questions.
In the articles provided to us on ‘Flipped’ classrooms, I was intrigued by the provision of arguments of both sides. In Janet Steffenhagen’s article on ‘Magic and Controversy’, she has addressed some of the concerns that teachers have expressed about this new model including lack of home computers and a fear of ‘too much homework’.
Again, in the blog posting entitled User Generated Education, Jackie Gerstein talks about the app gap and her hesitancy to focus on a method of delivery that is not necessarily available to all levels of society. Her activities on ‘Photo and/or Video Examples of Real Life Situations’ are given out with the ‘suggestion’ to use mobile devices but in no way require those devices as part of the criteria. I personally spend much of my time asking for devices to be put away. They are always so excited and delighted when I do allow them the option to listen to their devices during a designated work block.
I consider myself to be a project based teacher. I consider myself to be a teacher that allows students to work at their own pace. The one major stick in my craw has been the topic of Mathematics. I have not yet found a system that allows me to send some students off on a wild exploratory math related project while I sit with the lower end students and work with them on mastering the basics. This is the reason why I am so excited to hear and learn more about Salman Khan’s work. His explanation of his work, his critic’s thoughts, and his hopes for his program’s future inspire me greatly.
This year, more than any year passed, I have seen that my grade six Math students cannot handle me speaking to them on a topic. Fifty percent of them cannot repeat to me what I just said thirty seconds ago. It has forced me to look at other options for getting the concepts into their brains. I have tried giving them the textbook and saying, “You will teach Exponents to another set of students in three days and you will write them a quiz.” This was very challenging yet in the end very successful.
Salman’s humour and calm nature, as proven in his TED talk, are quite similar to how I think, or would like to think, that I am in my own classroom. I have used Camtasia to create tutorials for my students as well as introduce a topic when I know I will have a TOC in my room. (It really freaks them out when you are there, but not really there) As he states, I want to be enjoying my class time with my students. I want to be joking with them and exploring with them. Whether students are listening to a video or podcast the night before, or even during class time, this type of format allows us teachers to work one-on-one with our students and that is certainly not what the ‘19th Century Model’ was designed to do.
What I found to be a similarity with each of these articles and videos was that they were either providing an argument for two sides or they were giving their opinion on why alternate methods past or present were not up to par.
So, is this a revolution? Damn straight. Pardon ma français. It is the revolution I know that I have been looking for since I got into this profession ten years ago. I can only hope that we get through this revolution without any of the traditional beheadingsJ
Andrew