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Loose Filtering and History

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As part of our thinwalled collaboration, we are doing research on World War 2. Everything is being posted to our Hive Thinking site as students from Wingham and Snow Lake learn about this topic.

This has got me thinking about filters again.

As I’ve walked around my classroom I’ve seen students this week watching original footage posted to Youtube of Hitler’s speeches. I’ve seen students watching Canadian soldiers roll onto the beaches of Europe on D-Day, facing withering enemy fire. Others have been searching through archived photos of what are virtually human skeletons standing behind the barbed wire fences of concentration camps.

Taken piece by piece, it has been a disturbing week for many students as many of them faced for the first time some of the horror of human history. We have talked and talked about these things. We have discussed the holocaust, the causes behind the war, Canada’s role in it and the horror of battles and death.

Much of this has been made possible by the technology that we have access to. Original footage of powerful marches through Germany. Terrible photos. Things we simply would not have access to without technology. But even, having the technology, we could be locked out of this kind of work by our filters.

Yet, we aren’t.

As much as I rail against filters at all, I have to admit that ours are quite loose. Kids have been searching for information on “Nazis,” “Adolf Hitler,” “the holocuast,” etc etc. Not a single time this week have we run into the filtering system at our building.

I believe education is not always a gentle and easy process. Students need to learn about terrible things humans have done to each other. We must confront our history and it’s horror in order to learn from it. Now of course there are proper ways, times and ages to do this with kids. Grade one students do not need access to graphic pictures and videos. But the fact is, as teachers, these are the paths that we sometimes need to lead our students down.

How different this week would have turned out if, when my students Googled words like “Nazis,” they  ended up with the blocked screen so many people are so familiar with. The chance for education, learning, debate and understanding would have simply been cut off at that point. If filters are closing off students from difficult information like this, they are not in place to protect them, they are instead doing all they can to keep people immature and uneducated.

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Thinwalls Meets the Parents

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Love these bulletin boards that my teaching partner, Heather Durnin, has put up outside of her classroom in Wingham Ontario to introduce people to the Idea Hive.

Introducing the idea of the thinwalled classroom to the community, our collaboration has also been featued in Heather’s local newspaper:

The more information we can get out to people in our communities about what we are doing; the better.

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Building Learning Communities – Step Two: Generate Some Buzz

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The hive is buzzing!

The kids in Heather Durnin’s classroom and mine have started blogging and this week we will bring these kids together in the beginnings of full community.

While our photo contest will run until later in the week, we have also have had the students in our classes beginning to learn about blogging. They have written posts introducing themselves and have also completed an interests survey. Using Google Forms, Heather created a detailed survey asking all of our students about their likes, dislikes, fears, future plans and interests. Every student completed this survey and then, using the magic of google docs, the results were shared with them. Each student spent some time with the results of this survey, looking for similarities and differences between the two classes. They were then required to write a blog post about what they found.

As well as finding out a great many things about the classmates in their 2 700 km across classroom, many of them showed their excitement about this collaboration:

“Two classes are coming together  to make one giant hive and they are all buzzing with ideas.”

“The Idea hive is buzzing with excitement as we begin our year together.  Every one in the idea hive filled out a survey about our interests.  I have more in common with the Idea Hive then I thought!”

“I can`t wait to see what Mrs.Durnin and Mr. Fisher have in store for the Idea Hive class and what we will be writing about next.”

Bringing learners together in common spaces, helping them to build trust with each other and having some fun are essential parts of building a learning community. Taking chances with your learning does not happen without these shared experiences first. The next step is building up some buzz and excitement. We want our students to be excited and interested in this collaboration. By keeping the energy high, our students will be motivated to collaborate and eager to learn more about one another.

We have a further set of contacts scheduled. Beginning tomorrow we are putting our classrooms together in another skype call to teach the students about commenting – an essential skill and one that needs to be actively taught and modelled in a classroom blogging community. After this, we will begin our first set of assignments together, drawing our classrooms together through common content, readings and projects.

Learning communities do not emerge – they grow and need tending.

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Building Learning Communities – Step One: Have Some Fun!

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Building a learning community can be a difficult task and is one that involves some skill and understanding. Too often, we simply believe (like Kevin Costner) that “if we build it, they will come.”

We would like to believe that simply helping the students in our class to sign up for accounts on blogging and wiki sites will change their learning and the culture of our classrooms. Unfortunately, this simply isn’t true. Signing up for accounts will not make the students in your classroom more connected or globally aware. There’s more to it than that. They need to join together in a community.

For students to form a learning community takes time, and is a process. As teachers, we would like to jump in as quickly as possible, thinking that we are saving time and effort later if we move on to what we consider activities for learning as soon as we can; early in the school year or class.

For students to work and learn together, they need to have a level of comfort and trust with each other. Setting people together into a learning community and expecting them to open up and be willing to make mistakes in a public space without first spending some time together is not realistic. This is why one of the first steps of establishing an online learning community in your classroom is to have some simple fun together. This is what we’re doing in the Idea Hive to begin our school year.

The students in our two classrooms are 2 700 kilometres apart. We wanted them to be able to see each other, to be able to put names with faces. As well, we wanted the students in each location to be able to see the geography of each place and get comfortable with each other. This is why we’re starting the year off with a photo contest. This is the blog post written on the Idea Hive blog:

“Be a part of the hive!

Put those creative skills to work.

We are having a photo contest to start off the year. Take your idea hive badge and yourself (and some friends too if you really want to). Head someplace with your camera. Take as many pictures as you want. Make sure you’re in them (at least part of you!). Make sure your idea hive badge is there too. Post them up onto flickr using the email address that you get from your teacher. Scroll down this page and look on the right hand side to see a few of the pictures that are already up there. Click on the widget to head to flickr to see them all.

Let’s see how creative and innovative you can be. Who’s got the best imagination out there?

The deadline for the contest is September 23rd so let’s see what you’ve got!”

A simple idea that we are hoping will begin to develop some sense of location and trust between the two classes. Combined with other start of year activities such as a skype call with questions, an introductory survey and a “comment swap,” our two classes will begin to take the first steps into developing an online learning community which will take us all deeper into unknown territory.

Here are two of the pictures we’ve received at the half way point of the contest. See the entire set of them here.

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2 700 Kilometres Across…

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… that’s how big my classroom is.

On Thursday my class in Snow Lake had our first Skype call of the year on our second day of school. We skyped with Heather Durnin‘s class in Wingham ON. (Heather is a plpeep btw…)

Today our call was simply to connect our two classes and let our kids meet for the first time. Because this will be the first of many. Heather and I have hooked our classes up for the long haul this year. We are working with the thinwalls model. Thinwalled classrooms are different than traditional collaborations. In most globally collaborative models, students are hooked together with other classes for what I call “the sprint.” In the sprint we pull our kids together for six or eight weeks so they can complete a unit together. We spend our time praying that things don’t break down and we ask our principal’s for exceptions to be made to filtering policies and for websites to be opened up. We hold it together for the duration and then when the unit is over we go back to the way things were. Just when our kids are getting good at communicating globally and working in teams, the experience ends.

In a thinwalled classroom, you are in it for the long haul. We plan on having our students hooked together as one class for the entire school year. Our classroom blog will list all of the kids from both classrooms as one. They will be grouped together to complete assignments, to read novels and to blog. We have a few lessons planned already that we are going to be teaching both classes over skype and we will be reading a book aloud to both classes.Bringing our classes ever close together, the plan is to bring the students into daily contact with each other.

Thinwalls is about living openly and honestly with another teacher and another class, even though they may be far away. Heather and I have had to be open and honest with each other about ourselves, our styles and about the challenges we face.

Our students are already interested in the similarities and differences between our two spaces. Although we both live in smaller rural places, Heather lives in a place that is mainly supported by farming and is fairly close to urban areas whereas where I live is more isolated and supported by mining. It’s also interesting (and slightly strange) to note that although I have been using technology in my classroom for a number of years and worked with people from around the globe – this is the first time I’ve worked with someone from within my own country.

We will have a lot to share as we move forward about what we’re doing and how we do it. The tools we are using are available to all for no cost to very low cost (a pro flickr account – $25, for example). More important than that is the changes to our pedagogies we are working on to support learning in these ways.

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