Critical Thinking on the Web with Alan November

As a member of a team beginning a 1-to-1 laptop program at ISBangkok, I was part of a meeting with Educational Technology consultant Alan November. I knew nothing about him other than what I just described, and I have to report a pretty fascinating meeting.

I walked in hoping to have a consultant take a unit and 1-to-1-ify it. Instead he started off saying the most important thing to teach kids about computers/internet was critical thinking on the web. He started us off with a mock unit plan for the following topic:

How did different countries respond to the crisis in Haiti?

As a Math/Science teacher, I thought first of data and statistics that could be used in a math lesson. At that point, our team sidetracked and wondered about the math curriculum our school had recently adopted, Connected Math Project 2.

Alan showed us the computational knowledge engine, Wolfram Alpha, which he said essentially takes care of the mechanics of math forever. He was able to demonstrate that it could produce steps to solve math problems, not just give final answers. When we protested that we wanted our students to understand the math, not just produce it from the internet, he showed us an interesting technology way of demonstrating understanding. Students would make a screencast of the Wolfram Alpha results of a math problem and record themselves explaining the steps to solve the problem. Alan's choice of screencasting software was Camtasia Studio.

Link to My Own Example of a Math Screencast a-la Alan November

Another point Alan November made about the use of laptops in Math was for simple homework practice. He referred to research on influences on student learning done by John Hattie which found that instant feedback was one of the most significant influences on learning. The connection was that students could do self-scoring homework online rather than correcting it in class the next day, a day after that by the teacher, or never. Thanks to our school's Moodle, we are able to concur with Alan's point, because we have started using self-scoring homework and are encouraged by the results to continue using and improving it.

Finally, we returned to the initial Haiti example. Alan shared some Google search tricks, such as "zooming in" on links from a particular country by using a country code in a search including the "site command", for example, "site: hn" for Honduras. During one of his searches, he found a relevant link at the Australian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I believe. What he showed us was a link on the page that he said was gold. It was the "Contact Us" link. This link he said allows kids to interact with real people in the world. Via Skype they can have conversations with experts. They can record these phone conversations, edit them, and finally upload them as podcasts to iTunes to share with world. (His two technical notes were that the audio file must first be loaded to blog, and that Skype calls can be recorded with a piece of software called Audio Hijack Pro (on Macs)

He also briefly showed an example of validating a website. Honestly, it went by so quickly, I don't remember the details, but one idea was that through checking what pages link to a particular page, one can evaluate the particular page. He used Alta Vista and explained that it was better suited to this end.

While he showed these examples, he summed up the big picture by saying that one of our main goals should be teaching kids basic architecture of information, the grammar of Google. Doing this could be a learning for G6.

It was a very rich hour and a half and the list goes on. I'll summarize the last few items briefly.

He mentioned new classroom jobs of the technology age - tutorial designer, daily scribe, and he didn't get to what he said were an additional four. Each of the jobs would need to be taught, just as teachers teach anything else. He acknowledged that tutorials were work intensive and should be started using a volunteer system, which kids would sign up for once they saw how cool a tutorial was. In this context he also mentioned freeware for animation/movie making called Scratch that was created and run by MIT.

He showed an example of making a documentary using a screencast of Google Maps street view. He narrated while he panned Google's street cam along the road. It was as if he had been on the road with a hand-held video camera. This was probably the "coolest" use of technology he showcased. His example was for a Social Studies report about the Battle of Lexington (US History).

He showed an example of discussions that can go on via the web surrounding a video posted on a Ning.

He showed examples of posting pictures on Flickr and let students tag the image with overlays - This he called "no end to creativity."

When a concern arose about authentic audiences for student work, he mentioned that another way to get students connected rather than have them post on a blog and wait for the world to comment, was to got to a major website with extensive traffic and comment there, for example CNN's blog.

His ultimate message was that technology was a tool to to reach the goal of personalized education. He made a convincing case that there was ample information technology to begin moving Education in that direction.