Letting Go

This past November, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the Georgia Ed Tech Conference. The best presentation I heard happened to be the very first presentation on day one. Jaime Casap, the Chief Educational Evangelist at Google, gave an inspiring talk about changing the educational model from one with students regurgitating and memorizing facts to one that is inquiry driven. He stated that education is no broken but just needs to be tweaked. Advancements in technology have altered the way the new generation of students learn. Students, through open source materials, can be their own problem solvers. He stated that this shift should encourage us not to ask what our students want to be when they grow up but to ask what problems do they want to solve. (Video worth watching Jaime Casap National Conference Keynote 2016)

There are two reasons I make reference to Jaime Casap. The first is that I read an article by Grant Wiggins titled Great Teaching Means Letting Go. The second is that I watched a discussion led by Chris Lehmann focused of inquiry learning. Both of these media discuss the changing face of education and the need for educators to adapt to these changes. In the article, Wiggins discusses the need for students to transfer learned concepts and strategies to various situations. He emphasizes the importance of students working independently with the teacher’s role being one of inquiry asking students about “what they did, why, and what did and didn’t work” (Wiggins, 2016). In the podcast, Lehmann shares his belief that learning needs to be inquiry driven. Teachers need to ask questions that go beyond their own understanding and encourage students to do the same. Lehmann states technology has transformed teachers from being a source of knowledge to being mentors who build caring systems and structures to support student centered learning environments. Casap’s GAETC talk completely supports the ideas and beliefs shared by Lehmann and Wiggins. All three believe that good teaching need to be inquiry driven with Lehmann and Casap going further by including educational technology as a key component.

As I spend the summer weeks decompressing the 2017-2018 and then preparing for the 2018-2019 school year, these ideas are and will be at the forefront of my analysis and preparation.

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Searching the interwebs has become a necessary part of my world and probably the world of most educators. After completing the Google Challenge on multiple days, I realized that my search techniques are effective for finding the necessary information but a bit “messy”. I understand how to use keywords and multiple phrases to find the answers to the questions. What I don’t know are all the ins and outs of Google’s searching shortcuts. I have decided to spend some time in the coming weeks learning how to incorporate two or three shortcuts to improve my searching skills. I think the asterisk, quotation marks, and colon will be the three I will begin using.

What I’m realizing is that these “shortcuts” can help narrow the abundance of information to a better collection of credible sources. In today’s world where anybody can be an author, the more tools we have to decipher reliable sources from garbage the better. Finding information on any topic is possible, but the reliability of the source must always be questioned.

Back to a brief reflection on my searching pattern. I recently read the article, “The Information Behavior of the Researcher of the Future” and began thinking about how I conduct internet searches. I’m not going to lie, there are times (more often than not) where I will type in the actual question I am trying to answer. After reading the aforementioned article, I fall into a category of searchers who bounce from site to site, skimming content, and sometimes squirreling away PDFs to print off and read at a later time. I think much of my search behavior stems from having such limited time due to my profession, family responsibilities, and lack of free time.

Interestingly enough, some of my searching techniques are similar to teenagers. According to the article “How Teens Do Research in the Digital World,” teenagers often want to find answers quickly, lack patience and persistence when searching topics, and conduct searches based on questions. This occasionally occurs during my research as well. Another issue with teens doing research is that results can be reiterations of similar content. Debbie Abilock recommends using the method of triangulation to avoid this. Triangulation involves locating three different points of view pertaining to a topic.

Having been born in 1976, I’ve been labeled as a member of Generation X, arguably the greatest name for a generation since “The Greatest Generation.” People with birth dates beginning in 1993 are known as the Google Generation. Those born during this year and the years after have never known a world without the internet. Their first stop for information: “Okay Google.”

With the advancement of the internet, Google searches have become an integral element of our daily lives too. From checking weather, to ordering toilet paper, to consuming news, to connecting with friends, to researching any possible topic; the internet has become an element we can’t live without. I guess that makes us all adopted members of the Google Generation.

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I don’t mean to be Captain Obvious, but I’m sure we all have experienced the overwhelming amount of information at our fingertips when we are online. Having watched Infowhelm, I now have an understanding for why I have this feeling. This video shares an interesting perspective of the amount of information that is stored on the web. I3 stacks of books to Pluto if all was printed! (How many pages per book?) With so much “information” coming at us through social media, blogs, podcasts, emails, videos, etc., how do we discern facts from “alternative facts,” relevant from irrelevant, worthy of digesting from junk?

To some degree we all have strategies for guiding us through this process. As teachers with limited time, finding efficient strategies is necessary. To this purpose, I found Byan Alexander’s article regarding “info wrangling” extremely relevant. His system of receiving “inputs” from various sources, reflecting on that information, and then sharing thoughtful reflections tackles this filtering of information. However, his depth of “inputs” is extreme for me. Narrowing down these inputs to a handful of quality sources seems more effective. Karen Lirenman in The Journey from Digital Literacy to Digital Fluency discusses her success using Twitter. As Lirenman built her PLN on Twitter, she discovered a wealth of inspiration from like-minded educators. She also embraced one main element discussed in Creating Classrooms We Need: 8 Ways Into Inquiry Learning, and that is that you should embrace failures.

Upon reading Karen Lirenman’s article, I found that she has ideas related to my goals. She states that she is “gaining knowledge, and looking for ways to tweak the growth of others to better suit my own growth,” and “trying to be the innovator instead of the follower.” I share the same desires.

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FRIT 7234 First Task

I must say that I’m pretty excited to get going with my classes this semester.  In particular, I’m looking forward to learning about new web 2.0 tools that I have yet discovered….and learning about them at the pool.  

With this being said, I need to create some goals for my Information Fluency & Inquiry Learning class.  Upon reading through the class syllabus and spending some time thinking about what I would like to achieve, I have created the following goals.  

1) At the end of the summer semester I will have established a platform upon which to build my professional learning network

2) At the end of the summer semester I will be able to identify and use four new web 2.0 tools for improving my professional learning network

3) At the end of the summer semester I will be able to infuse newly acquired knowledge into weekly lessons through the 2018-2019 school year to improve the learning of ALL students.