My thoughts about using personal learning networks in the classroom, particularly in middle school.
--the fellow student you're talking to doesn't have to be sitting right next to you but could be half way around the world
Well, it definitely is an appealing idea and I think it fits in well with what we've been talking about a bit lately in 7th grade, inquiry based learning.
And I had to big "a-has!" during the 31 January class. The first "aha" was how to better use the RSS thing. I had used google reader to set up RSS feeds for myself (as in personal use) and was quickly overwhelmed with the amount of stuff that came in. I guess I got to "feeder happy" but it was tempting with all of the content-specific feeds available. So, I was a bit skeptical when we started talking about them for student use in class. However, I hadn't thought through the full possibilities of their use, particularly how specific you can get as in, from the example from Jeff, gets feeds not just from a specific source (ie The New York Times) but about a specific topic, and even a VERY specific topic--say articles about climate change based in China and having to do with coal mining. As an extension of that idea (a specific topic to "feed" off of) I'd also knew about setting up a feeder that my students can have access to. So I could set up a feeder page on my wiki that has categories and sub-categories that individual students could be interested in. Therefore, I could manage the feeds for the kids, at least for the first part of the year until they get the skills to create their own content specific feeds, and the kids could focus on wading through the information that comes up.
The second 'aha' was the discovery of the amazing website globalvoicesonline.org The blogs listed, the search engine for those blogs, etc., are simply amazing and so directly applicable to my (7th grade) students. I wish I'd know about this when we read a historical fiction and semi-autobiographical novel by a Kenyan man set in British-colonial 1950s. How wonderful would it have been for kids to have had access to blogs from Kenyans to help them access what life is like there now, or at the very least to get an understanding of what the current issues are in Kenya and (hopefully) make a connection back to the colonial era. I am definitely going to explore these resources for our current course of study, rice cultivation in SE Asia.
From the very beginning of class on Saturday (31-01-09) and that short video clip about how the student who used Personal Learning Networks I was thinking about the use of text books in our middle school classes. I teach humanities, which is a combo of language arts curriculum and social studies curriculum. students are not issued a textbook for either, and we (as in the humanities 7 teachers) were just last week tossing around the ideas of getting text books for the students. To text-book or not to text-book sort of boils down to two opposing issues. First, as the population of teachers at international schools is somewhat transient, there is the need to have a "fixed curriculum", as in a set (dead?) document that spells out very specifically what kids are to do and when. The main idea behind that being when inevitably new teachers come in, almost every year, they can be given a very specific set of....instructions?....for "how to teach 7th grade humanities.
What is more appealing, though harder to define and comes with a very much fluid and living curiculum can be based around the concept of Personal Learning Networks. I don't think the topics under study by 7th grade humanities students needs to change from any given year to the next, but I don't see why the exact resouces at the student's disposal needs to stay the same.
Last, all of this, the Personal Learning Networks, giving students a topic and sending them off on an inquiry based learning expedition, does represent a bit of a paradigm shift, and probably a threat to some teachers and parents, not to mention a possibly unwelcome challenge and responsibility for some students: the idea that each individual student must take respobsibility for her own learning. Just the act of finding reliable, meaningful resources for any given topic should be a rigourous academic thing. I remember way back when I was finishing up my BA in literature and doing my "major author" course (Willa Cather). One of the roughest assignments, much more tedious and time consuming than even the gazillion page essay I had to write, was creating a bibliography for that major essay long before even writing the first word of the first draft. However, I can remember will my professor looking over my list of 30+ potential topics with a fine toothed comb and deleting ones he knew to be useless of wildly off topicc and adding a coupel others he thought I might find useful. So for that assignment my personal learning network consisted of me, my professor, and a final list of 20 books. Now, if a sizeable chunk of those 20 resources could have been dynamic and online.........
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