Paperless Classes

Last year, for the first time, five of my six classes went paperless. Since I teach in a computer lab, every student has access to a computer during the class and every student has their own student folder available to them on the school server. Each student also has a district Moodle account so the resources were all there for us. It took nearly most of the prior summer to organize the hundreds of documents that were uploaded to Moodle, but once the school year started I couldn't have been happier.

Instead of having to get copies made and organize mountains of papers during that first week of school, my desk was clean. Instead of having to worry about getting a handout to an absent student when he returned, I didn't give it a thought. Instead of organizing trays and folders to receive students' work throughout the day, I spent my time working with the students on their projects.

For me, going paperless was liberating. And my students really seem to like it as well. Instead of carrying/organizing a cumbersome notebook, they have organized all of their handouts (downloaded from Moodle) and notes (taken on their computers during class) in their student folder on the school computer. They take tests and quizzes on Moodle and get an instant grade as soon as they hit the "submit" button. They hand in all programming assignments on Moodle and like the fact that they can do so from home at anytime day or night. Their grades are easy to view on Moodle and they particularly like the forums that are set up to discuss class topics.

It even has come in handy with regard to classroom management. When the class is getting off task or noisy, we set up a chat on Moodle and no one is allowed to speak out loud. All discussions of a topic are made in an instant-message-like environment and it really helps to get them focused and encourage participation.

In the end, going paperless and using a content-delivery system such as Moodle has given me a lot more time to spend with the students and less time being a "paper shuffler" and "organizer freak." And now with new collaborative tools learned this summer, there is so much more I can add to this environment that will benefit both myself and my tech-loving students.

Big Shifts

There are many shifts that teachers are going to have to face in this new age of the Read/Write Web. Many will affect my classroom and my mindset about how I teach, but one is particularly important to the content I teach.

As a computer science teacher I teach different programming languages using different software and even various computer hardware. Each year I find myself faced with software upgrades that alter how students will be able to access their work or new security issues that force me to remove content taught in previous years, Java version upgrades that change the content of a course and even AP course requirements. Keeping up with the changes is a challenging process. But in the eyes of the old paradigm where textbooks are the backbone of a course, I find these changes pale in comparison with the challenge of finding/offering my students updated textbooks as primary resources. Textbooks in this area of study have a half-life of about six months and no reasonable school district will allow new textbook purchases every year.

The "big shift" that I am currently faced with is to create an open-source-type classroom in which everyone contributes to a dynamic curriculum that considers all the changes and relishes in the discovery of them. The core objectives will remain the same but as programming languages change and move to more Web-based tools themselves, my students and I can learn about them together. And as I am learning new collaborative tools this summer, I'm finding that this shift won't be as difficult as I might have initially thought. Whew.

Skype

As educators in a new technological world, we are going to have to get out of our "comfort zone." The use of new communications tools and the potential for them to connect our students to others in similar courses across town and around the globe cannot be ignored. As Wesley A. Fryer states, (http://www.wtvi.com/TEKS/05_06_articles/skype-in-the-classroom.html) "Skype is an example of a potentially “disruptive” educational technology tool because it can fundamentally change the teaching and learning environment . . . this means increasing student achievement, while simultaneously encouraging students as well as teachers to engage in worthwhile and creative tasks. Twenty-first century educators should aspire for nothing less."

Students will be using these technologies at work in the near future and preparing them for this is also important. My high school, in fact, is installing VoIP technologies in every classroom in our district this summer and all employees will be required to use them. As Fryer points out, schools are "using wiring already installed for campus local area networks and Internet access. VoIP systems can prove to be more flexible and less costly than traditional phone lines for organizations of all sizes, including schools. In the case of VoIP software like Skype, the additional cost to install and use the software to make Internet-based phone calls is zero. Bandwidth, or Internet connection capacity, is utilized when Skype / VoIP calls are made, but the amount of bandwidth used for audio-only connections is much less compared to most videoconference connections which include both video and audio." It's an exciting world we live in!

Another photo from Flickr

Instead of directly sending a photo to my blog, I saved one from Flickr onto my computer and than was able to add the image here, also pretty easy! I can see that adding photos for my students to their blogs could really add another dimension to their writings and create an added interest.

Image Citation: Marburger Schoss (2006, March 28). Retrieved July 14, 2007 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dusi_bbg/119345414/in/photostream/.

Elisabethkirche Marburg on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Elisabethkirche Marburg on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Lots of Flickr photos and easy to share. This one is picture of church near my daughter's apartment in Marburg, Germany and was able to "blog it" easily. Wow!

Wikis in My Classroom

A particular interesting use of wikis in education is that of creating online "textbooks." California is working on an Open Source Textbook Project (http://www.opensourcetext.org/) and South Africa has their entire high school curriculum in a wiki (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/South_African_Curriculum). Because the content in my computer programming courses changes rapidly, I'm considering creating a wiki for a textbook supplement that students and I can all update as necessary.

My first experience with creating a wiki project as a group has gone quite well. We are not completely finished but the discussion section of the wiki makes it easy to work out the plans and creating the wiki itself is simple. Links are easy to add and the most challenging part was trying not to spend too much time searching for interesting related media. Once I got on YouTube and got distracted by off-topic videos, I could have spent many unproductive hours there!

I have used Wikipedia for a few years and it has proven to be a fairly reliable resource on most topics that I have read about. I will continue to use it and think it is a valuable tool and also understand that, due to its open-source creation, all information is not always valid and I need to make that distinction when I use it.

Since I have not yet added wiki creation to my courses I'm not sure if I will encounter resistance. I doubt it. The majority of my students are more technically advanced than the average teenager (which is already more advanced than us non-teenagers!) and I believe that they will enjoy the experience and the collaborative effort it will entail.

Wikis

I have been a long-time consumer of Wikis but had never created one myself until recently. There is a lot of good information available regarding how to best use Wikis as a collaboration tool in education but the one that really got my attention was this one: https://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp?bhcp=1

The author stresses an important point. "To truly empower students within collaborative or coconstructed activities requires the teacher to relinquish some degree of control over those activities." I think many objections to the use of Wikis, from parents to administrators to teachers themselves, is that to allow Wikis to work as intended, teachers must give up some of their control and this is a very difficult thing for teachers to do.

As a teacher of juniors and seniors in a high school environment, I feel that students are ready to take on this challenge and it is even a necessary part of their development on their way to the "real world" that is just steps away for most of them. I am going to be the one that needs my hand held, not them.