Be AWESOME!!!

Meaningful involvement of my learners. Hmmm… Good cause. You mean, not like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhiCFdWeQfA. Nope. More like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2GBVzoVNbE.

The last thing I would liked to be remembered for as a teacher is that I was boring and that I disgraced my subject by presenting it in a drab and monochrome way. So what is the plan? Here goes:

·    First thing first. Be excellent as a teacher. Know my game. Get to know the curriculum ASAP. And note to self: CAPS is just the empty colouring book. Get out those crayons and make it beautiful. Read, read and read again to keep on educating myself. Make sure I am an expert at my subject. Lifelong student. Practice what you preach.

·    ALWAYS be passionate about my subject. If I’m not, why should they be?

·    Make the content relevant. That is why I’m absolutely bananas about Economics and Business Studies. Daily it’s all over the newspapers. Live feed of relevant information: printed or digital. No excuses.

·    Care. What a powerful concept! It was Theodore Roosevelt, the USA’s 26^th president from 1901 to 1909, who said the following iconic words “People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care”. I will thus set out to make my care, love and concern for my learners a tangible reality in my class.

·    Freedom of speech. Not exactly like Article 16 of the Bill of Rights, but almost. Like in “I have the freedom to share my contribution in class, knowing that the class is a safe space to do so and because I feel valuable, my contribution will also be.” I will NOT tolerate any mockery of anyone’s contribution. Period.

·    Open communication channels with my learners and the experienced reality that I am accessible for them. Not just for their studies, but also for life. Because life happens.

·    Use multimedia. Kids crave anything on a screen. YouTube is my favourite. Weave it into my lessons. Use humour. Use touching and inspiring clips. One picture is worth a thousand words…

·    Use groupwork, like Vygotsky taught us. Properly planned. To engage everyone. Fishbowl. Panel discussions. Role plays. Blah blah blah…

·    Make sure my physical class invoke impressions of the Knysna Forest and not the Central Karoo, ie make it beautiful (not that the Karoo is not beautiful, but I am sure you get the idea).

Now the proof of the pudding is in the eating of it. Now at least I’ve got a plan. Hopefully this plan will come together, like Hannibal of The A-Team always used to say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPQlXNH36mI

Hasta la vista!

Complete Intellectual Freedom: Blessing or Curse?

Tech-mediated self-directed distance learning… Now that is a mouthful! Let me first get to the bottom of what this actually means by breaking up the concept in its constituent parts.

“Tech-mediated” implies a process that is mediated or brought about by the means of technology. For me, this constitutes “internet-mediated”.

According to the Oxford Online Dictionary, “self-directed” implies an activity that is under one’s own control.

Also according to the clever dudes at Oxford, “distance learning” implies a method of studying in which lectures are broadcast or lessons are conducted by correspondence, without the student needing to attend a school or college.

Thus the concept implies a method of studying completely under the control or discression of the student in which lectures or lessons are accessed via the internet without the student needing to attend a school or college. We are asked to argue the potential of this approach to learning.

The aforementioned approach is basically the model of The Independent Project as initiated in 2009 by a learner, Sam Levin, at Monument Mountain Regional High School in Massachusetts, USA. This concept is very radical in my view and definitely has its pro’s and cons.

As pro’s, I would list the following:

-It makes room for the intelligent but a bit rebellious learner who tends to be at loggerheads to conform with the rigid structure of the public schooling system.

-Because the learners choose their own fields of study, it ensures that they study subject matter which interests them and which they might feel are useful for them.

-It ensures that no limit is placed upon the creativity of learners.

-It ensures that intellectually gifted learners keeps being stimulated and being paced at their own speed, ensuring that they don’t become bored with the learning process.

-If successfully utilised, it teaches young learners to be very responsible for their own learning, careers and lives.

As to cons, here is my list:

-This system would probably only work with a small portion of responsible and very independent learners.

-Very few public school systems would make room for this system in their midst. In an article by Matthew Whalan in The Berkshire Edge of 14 July 2014, he alludes to Monument that it “may very well be one of the best, most creative public schools for miles in every direction” but he also follows on to say that its principal “may be one of the bravest principals for miles as well”.

-The same article also mentions how expensive this system of learning is. This is thus definitely not a model for teaching the masses and therefore I doubt that it is very suitable for the South African context.

-It is difficult to evaluate the success of this system. Whalan makes the following statement in this regard: “The Independent Project has become a mess in some ways. No one can ever seem to tell if it is “succeeding” or not, and no one can seem to even define “success” anymore…”

I have serious doubts about the viability of The Independent Project for mass education, but can see its merits for small groups of special students with unique learning expectations. I thus see The Project only as an educational experiment from which we as educators can learn from and see how we can apply its pro’s to our current educational reality.

I think there is much to be learnt from Whalan’s statement that “students will be more powerful, more passionate, more intelligent and more creative human beings if they have control over their world, rather than being forced to be uniform creatures who they may not want to become”. For me, this statement begs for more independence of learners and warns of the dangers of boxing in our learners into mass identities in which they have no say in.

The Method Is Not Sacred

I believe that education should be relevant and prepare learners for life out there (hopefully intelligent…). And technology is changing life on this planet at a very rapid pace. Many moons ago when I arrived at the shores of Stellenbosch University for my undergraduate studies, life and society was much different. I saw the new South African flag for the first time on a fellow Majuba resident’s T-shirt early in my first year (and instantly fell in love…). And cellphones was still limited to those brick-sized Nokias and the early movers who used them were labeled to be yuppies… And the internet? Never heard of. But five years later at the time of my departure from Stellenbosch’s green pastures, possessing a cellphone was not enough to stand out in the crowd and impress your neighbour anymore. And by that time, every student had their own univerisity email account and most were avid internet users.

Once at a training session for children’s church coordinators, it was said that “the message is sacred, but not the method”. In that context, the message of the gospel was and should always be sacred, but PLEASE move beyond puppetry and other old school methods to convey that message when today’s kids are used to the wide eyed “Full HD and Dolby Surround” experiences of PlayStation, DSTV, YouTube and the likes. I believe that this idea is partially true for all education, in that although the message might not be sacred, the methodology you use to teach should be relevant and exciting to your learners. And boy oh boy, how big is social media among today’s youth?!

But let’s get to the business end of this blog. The question again? (Sorry, got a bit zoned out like Walter Mitty…). How to incorporate or utilise social media in my curriculum specialisations, which are Economics, Accounting and Business Studies.

In all three subjects, I would request my learners to follow the Twitter debate on the government’s annual budget and make at least one posting themselves. The trending debate of this year’s budget happened at #Budget2016.

For Business Studies, I will assign each learner a certain business listed on the JSE whose publishing of its financial statements they must study online and post a comment on the company’s official Twitter account (and obviously also include a relevant hashtag for our class that I will provide).

I will make use of Twitter to conduct an informal group quiz test where both the questions and answers have to be posted on Twitter.

I will request my learners to write essays for Economics and Business Studies by means of blogging, and then tweeting their fellow learners with the links of their blogs and ask them to read at least one fellow learner’s blog and then tweeting a comment on it (same model as used for this module in Digital Pedagogy).

As an assignment, I will request my learners to create and post a YouTube video on any topic in the curriculum that interests them.

I will make use of Remind to send out uni-directional messages to my learners’ mobile phones. The nature of the messages would be, among others, to encourage them during exams, to send out links to noteworthy online newspaper articles, and to send important reminders.

The triple bottomline?
1) The method is NOT sacred!
2) Social media provides such a myriad of opportunities to bring excitement into my classes!
3)  Don’t be old school: make lemonade from the potential “lemon” of social media in your class!