SLA

My first year at SLA was both humbling and a tremendous learning experience. One of the things that I learned this year in my one to one classroom is that the technology helps to facilitate a more democratic learning environment.

As a teacher from the progressive mode I had tried to create learning environments where I was not the center of attention. As we all know, the traditional ways of giving students more power in the classroom include moving away from lecture-dominated classes and towards collaborative learning and purposely letting students guide discussions as much as possible. Despite efforts such as these I always felt that my classes still, at the end of the day, had me at the center of what was happening. Laptops in my classroom changed that for me in a couple of ways.

In terms of communication, the one to one environment allows multiple conversations to happen at once. Instead of each comment going to the teacher and then back to the class an electronic forum, such as the one that Moodle provides, allows students to have running conversations that can have multiple threads. By definition the teacher becomes one voice among many in a forum environment.

I first realized the democratic power of electronic forums when I posted a question for students to respond to on the topic of race relations after the first two weeks of class. (SLA is one of the most diverse schools in the district, and many students had never experienced a classroom with kids from so many different backgrounds.) The response from students to this question was fascinating, not just for its content, but for the seriousness of purpose the question created. As a teacher we have all been in a position where a discussion takes off and people are talking over one another. In a Moodle forum, however, everyone who has something to say can say it and reply to others. Best of all, students with great points to make, but who are more reserved than their vocal classmates, can have finally have voice. I was reminded that frequently the people who are hesitant to speak in History class have some of the most thoughtful things to say. This year, with one to one laptops, the conversation in my classroom was altered profoundly- and the students experience was qualitatively different than in a regular classroom.

Beyond distributing the classroom conversation to more people, the one to one laptop environment allowed me to more easily create learning environments where students could take part in framing the agenda of their learning. On its most simple level this takes the form of students exploring the web to put together information in order to solve problems. (In a textbook-based class everything is bound by the limits of the teacher’s knowledge and/or the text.) At a more profound level, however, my experience with an inquiry-based curriculum assisted by laptops, showed that students could drive the agenda of the course in a more profound way than what is possible in a more traditional classroom. More on how that works in a future posting.