Techlearning blog

In the simplest view, best practice occurs when a teacher uses the resources at his or her disposal, blends them with a study of subject matter, engages the kids, and evaluates the kids on the learning that takes place. If learning occurred as indicated by the assessment, then you might be tempted to say that was an example of best practice.

But which resources to use?
Which subject matter is to be studied, and should there be an authentic context to that study?
What does engagement really mean? Every kid?
What kind of evaluation? Does the evaluation tool match the tasks associated with the learning?
How many kids learned? All kids? And what occurs when you know that not all kids learned?

Best practice becomes a moving target. Real fast.

Enter Web 2.0 to the mix.

There’s more tools. More capability. More messiness and the potential for more disorder. Sites are blocked. More discussion when and where to use these new tools. New learning scenarios have to be measured against learning goals. What happens when kids become content creators? What happens when the classroom has the potential to become permeable?

Here’s what happens. It’s Darren Kuropatwa’s classes. Best practice, meet Web 2.0.

Darren is a math department chair in a high school in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Much of what Darren does in his class is supported by Web 2.0 tools. In fact, these tools, in the hands of a skilled teacher, take learning to a new place. Take a look at his AP Calculus class blog from last year, subtitled appropriately as an interactive learning ecology.

Let’s start with tools, because that will provide a beginning framework. Blog by Blogger, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Sharealike license. RSS. Class notes posted in Slideshare. Del.icio.us links to other math resources. Links to other Math blogs. Flickr. Clustermap. Google Calendar. Write to my Blog. AnswerTips. At his other sites, Darren uses Yackpack and Spresent as well. Look at the richness, and the potential of these tools to support learning in a new way. Kids get a fundamental understanding of how to use the various tools that can be used for developing their own methodologies for learning throughout a lifetime.

So, all kids contribute to the blog, so it’s multiplayer, so all have a voice. The big word in the last sentence-contribute-so they are active participants, in writing posts as well as commenting on others. That’s the first step. Throw in tags and labels and the kid’s stuff becomes aggregated together in the blog, so that the body of a student’s work can be seen as a portfolio. Add in the ClusterMaps and the links to Technorati to prove to the kids that what they do has a global audience. What happens to student performance when that performance has a world-wide audience (and it does, look for yourself)? What happens when the classroom becomes permeable?

Take a look at the creative application of Flickr. Kids, find an image of something typical and use the notes feature in Flickr to identify the calculus in every day life. And while you are at it kids, get your own Flickr account. Authenticity meets creativity meets Flickr-all of that promotes visual literacy, interpretive skills, creativity…

It doesn’t stop there. Darren requires a Scribe post, where a single student is responsible for summarizing/synthesizing the learning that took place in class that day. He’s even got a Scribe Hall of Fame. See Manny’s scribe post if you want to see what these kids are learning.

Then take a look at the wiki, where the kids have built a Wiki Solution Manual for the AP test. In the process they learn how to contribute to wikis on a couple of levels. Darren requires kids to make a significant contribution and a constructive contribution to the wiki, which are clearly defined on the page. He can then assess student’s contributions by examining the history/version feature of the various wiki pages to see who has contributed and in what ways.

There’s more. Darren also has a Developing Expert Voices project (from the post: Experts always look back at where they have been to improve in the future.), where kids have to create, not copy, four problems that are representative of their learning. The kids used multiple tools to demonstrate that understanding (no surprise there), and their project was evaluated using a class-created rubric. The kids have to “take on the role of the teacher.” And we all know that you don’t understand something to its essence until you have to teach it.

Check out Manny’s work and see the project blog to see how Darren's kids demonstrate their understanding of calculus.

There’s more best practice here, take a look when you have a chance. It’s good stuff, probably the best I have seen. Yeah, it’s an AP Calculus class, but this is all scaleable.

So, how many of you want your kid to be in Darren Kuropatwa’s Calculus class?

Listen to Darren explain his practice in this podcast from Dean Shareski.

My thanks to Darren for sharing this.