[This piece appeared in Penn Charter Magazine, winter 2008. It was a contracted piece. The final version was cut to meet space-constraints. This is the uncut version.]
Even as powerful new communications tools engulfed our culture during the last century, most readers over thirty-five weathered the storms of adolescence in remarkably low-tech school settings. For instance, most readers of this magazine probably can’t remember the names of movies watched during school hours, but do remember the times when the strip of film jammed or snapped entirely–flip-flip-flip!
Parents and grandparents also remember how families were once teased by the false promises of radio and television advocates who touted their technologies as the next great tool to revolutionize schools. But for many years–for decades really–it was school as usual.
Not today. Walk the hallways of Penn Charter and you’d be surprised and delighted to see how teachers and students are using new gadgets and new technologies to expand their horizons and communicate more effectively, not only with each other, but with ever-expanding audiences as they advance through the school’s divisions. To quote a recent General Motors advertisement: “This is not your daddy’s caddy.” No where is this excitement and innovation more apparent than in the blogging activity of students, teachers, and Penn Charter’s technology team.
Blogging to Learn
Starting in Lower School, students learn that a blog is an abbreviated word for a “weblog,” which is a website that offers information that can be easily updated by users of all ages, talents, and abilities. People who update blogs by adding information to them are called “bloggers.” Writers write, singers sing, and bloggers blog.
In Lower School, teachers have created a classroom blog that serves mostly as a message board for students and parents. In 5th grade, teachers Malcolm Ford and Steve Wade are experimenting with a blog where students post their science homework and lab results. The goals include teaching young students Internet-safety rules as they begin to explore how to access and post information to the school’s intranet, a safe area available only to members of the class, or to parents who have the password.
In Middle School, students are given more freedom to post and manage shared digital content, just so long as they mind the school’s mantra that all behaviors online should be “safe, legal, and effective.” Middle school English teacher Tom Kim has created both classroom blogs and individual student blogs for his 7th and 8th grade students.
In a recent project, Kim divided his class into small groups and asked each to choose a different novel to read. As the narratives in the novels unfolded, each group managed its own blog where students maintained discussions about what they were reading and learning. The blogs became virtual literature-circle groups.
“Blogs change the way I teach,” Kim explains. “In the classroom, I control most of the conversation, even if I try to get out of the way. But online, young people can engage with one another and really learn from one another. Blogs encourage genuine conversations among young people.”
The online conversations that Kim is talking about are not written in the instant-text-message language that most adults find dangerously close to gibberish. Instead, students are encouraged to listen carefully to one another and to post comments in standard-written English, even if the language is not as formal as what might be required in a graded essay.
In the comment field of the blog, students get to see–down to the level of syntax and punctuation–how others are constructing answers or adding to the knowledge of the class. In this way, they begin to appreciate how all learning, at its best, is really a group project, making good on the educator’s mantra that authentic learning is collaborative.
Sometimes the most powerful “voices” online come from the least likely student–that shy girl who hides behind her bangs or the boy in the back row who rarely talks. Online, these students sometimes become the “experts” and eventually gain skills and confidence that spill over into the classroom in the form of a more confident self. These kinds of triumphant transformations happen often at Penn Charter.
“Sometimes a student who finds himself or herself drowned out in regular classroom discussions finds he or she can have a voice through blogging,” Kim offers. “Blogging gives my Middle School students the chance to work out their thoughts about a subject on their own time and articulate them as carefully as they choose to. The informal nature of the medium takes the pressure off of having to write perfectly formed sentences while still allowing a viable soapbox to speak from.”
Michael Moulton, Director of Technology, concurs: “We sometimes think that the quiet student doesn’t have much on his or her mind. . . . I’ll never forget how one boy who had never willingly spoken in class wrote expressively on our site [a classroom blog set aside for students in the 10th grade Quakerism Principles and Practices class] about several of the big ideas we were covering. We came to understand and appreciate him through his on-line participation, and I watched as he then participated more openly in the classroom and on service trips. He was waiting to be known.”
Who says technology breeds alienation, poor social skills, or poor grammar? Stick your head in the school’s computer lab during any lunch period and witness a bustling hive of activity and collaboration–nouns and verbs flying across the room, zeroes and ones flying around the Internet. Young people are using technology to redefine themselves and stake their place in a digital world. This is a place where wireless communication, digital data, and creative thinking will be paramount, at least for people who want to thrive in the global marketplace of the 21st century.
Blogging to Communicate with the World
In the hands of engaged and knowledgeable teachers, technology transforms the school not into Hogwarts School for up-and-coming Wizards, but a place where students hone their skills for what New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman calls a “flat world”–a globalized, always-connected network of markets. In this world, our students will have to compete for good jobs not just with their peers from Episcopal and Germantown Academy, but with “faceless” students from Hong Kong and Bangladesh.
How do schools prepare young people for such a world?
The multiplication tables must still be memorized, but students today need creative, higher-order thinking projects, which require them to find, re-present, and even create information–often digital information–for wider and wider audiences. The Internet can be one of the teacher’s best aids in this endeavor.
When students know that anyone in the world with an Internet connection can read what they have written, created, or posted on a blog, it is remarkable how quickly their thinking improves, not to mention the final product.
In Lower School, students are just putting on their training wheels in terms of accessing and navigating blogs, which are very safe online environments. In Middle school, they get several chances to take a spin around the block–that is, students are publishing and managing content on classroom blogs, and occasionally receive feedback from the teacher or from an outside expert.
In Upper School, they are finally given the keys to the car and are encouraged to take the technology for a real spin around the far reaches of the neighborhood, which may include the global neighborhood. It takes a lot of technological know-how and administrative support to manage the complexities of these ever-expanding online worlds.
Penn Charter’s technology department works with teachers in all three divisions and sees its role as a faculty advocate, employing a Quakerly approach that recognizes that not all teachers have (or need) blogs, that not all PC blogs are alike, and that when a teacher–or a teacher and a group of motivated students–comes up with a pedagogical idea and a technological challenge, it forces a convergence.
The technology department’s goal is to support and manage the convergence, which often requires careful planning and continuing collaboration with teachers and students. “Putting web publishing tools into the hands of teachers who are passionate about their subject matter yields projects that motivate students to do their best,” offers Michael Moulton.
“From my vantage point, I get to watch English classes where students linger afterward and go beyond assignment-basics for their newly expanded audience. I get to see students coming back to a favorite piece they wrote for a class a year ago to have it read and posted just right. The individual pieces of work get a new relevancy [online]. The cumulative set of work in their blog portfolio begins to represent the range of their academic ability.”
In Upper School, 9th graders in the first semester are encouraged to post their work as a digital portfolio on a part of the school’s blogging network. As students make their way through Upper school, they are encouraged to add content to their sites, which include projects that they have created in and out of school, like artwork, photography, podcasts, and videos.
One student commented that her blog is like a MySpace site dressed up and ready for its first job interview. (See seniors Todd Cooke and Jordyn Shaffer’s blogs.) These sites showcase students’ academic work to the world. They also capture their personalities and passions.
“My blog has enabled me to show relatives my writing pieces this year with just a click of a button,” said senior Jordyn Shaffer. “There is a dual purpose here: students are more engaged while [we] simultaneously learn how to operate tools that we may have to master in the future.”
College counselors and English teachers are starting to refer to these sites in their college recommendations, and several teachers have heard back from college admissions officers and professors about the quality and uniqueness of the work. Penn Charter teachers are leading the way in utilizing communications technology to supercharge pedagogy.
For example, they are using blogs in all sorts of contexts, not only as extensions of classroom conversations or presentation “studios” for student work, but also as a way to bring people, from novice to expert, into the conversation. Lower and Upper School students are working together to investigate Quaker testimonies on a cross-divisional blog created by history teacher Lee Payton. These teenagers and grade-schoolers are blogging about how Quaker values are present in their lives.
For teachers, the possibilities are endless.
Want to have a conversation with an author, a professor, a critic, or a journalist? Want to utilize the “oral histories” or expertise of classmates’ families, relatives, and friends? Want to talk to someone in Boston or Baghdad about something that is going on under their boots or in their brains? No need for a special in-school assembly or a literal classroom visit–just an e-mail invitation and a hypertext link to the classroom blog. To quote Shakespeare: “All the world’s a stage.” On the Internet, anyone “can contribute a verse.”
Transformations
The classroom is no longer a pedagogical black box. The powerful features of the Internet are even starting to enrich conversations in real time. When ex-Seinfeld star Michael Richards and radio shock-jock Don Imus slip up and utter foolish comments in public (which are now easily recorded and shared around the Web), the following day there are teachers around the country ready to pounce.
Imagine a Penn Charter English teacher leading a discussion on race relations in the context of Ralph Ellison’s classic novel Invisible Man. Imagine the same teacher in a room with an Internet connection and an interactive SmartBoard, like all Penn Charter classrooms. There is nothing like the Internet and a video-sharing site, such as YouTube, to make difficult issues visible and immediately relevant for students.
The Internet also brings “old” texts to life in new ways. For example, during discussions last year on F. S. Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, this author took his class to the computer lab and sent his students on an Internet-scavenger hunt. Twenty minutes later they were all watching video clips on the classroom SmartBoard of Model T Fords bumping across dusty roads, a couple engaged in a dance called the Charleston, and a ruddy modern-day man giving a tour of a speakeasy that he had uncovered in his basement.
Teachers in the foreign language department are using YouTube to locate advertisements and music videos in the target language, thereby fostering language acquisition. Michelle Emery, a French teacher working in concert with teachers in Canada and France, has even lead her students to produce a video (in French) about Penn Charter. The goal is to post it on YouTube, which gives new meaning to the concept of a penpal (a video-web-pal?).
Another foreign language teacher, Eric Jimenez, asks his students to use their cell phone to call a toll-free number and record podcasts in Spanish. The podcasts are then uploaded to a podcasting site, which serves as a digital library of his students’ progress in mastering another language.
Technology has altered the landscape of school and has changed how students and teachers think about and perform their work. Director of Educational Technology Michael Moulton and Vicki Miles, director of Lower School technology at Penn Charter, call what they have witnessed over the past decade as “positively transformative.”
Where will we be five or ten years from now as technology continues to transform and redefine the nature and possibilities of school? Techno-savvy teachers and students will be the T-rexes of the digital age. And, this time around, it won’t be an Ice Age or a Mega-meteor that will lead to their extinction.
The key to survival in the coming age will be quick adaptation and perpetual innovation, two values our school community has embraced. These days you’d be hard-pressed to find a piece of chalk in a Penn Charter classroom. Everything–or nearly everything–has gone digital.
According to senior Matt Domenick, most students love to watch movie clips on YouTube and use new technologies, like blogs and interactive media, “instead of the primitive listening” often done in his parents’ high school classes.
“I would rather use the new technology,” offers Matt. “Wouldn’t you?”
Mark Franek was the upper school dean of students for seven years. He is now an adjunct professor of writing at Philadelphia University.
