Got to Catch Them All

Two recent developments in New Zealand in the digital world may not on the surface appear to be connected, but connections can sometimes not be what they seem.

Last week, our Minister of Education, Hekia Parata announced that digtial technology would be added to the education curriculum. Ms Parata stating:

"The information technology sector is one of the fastest growing sectors in New Zealand, with a demand for skilled graduates. This step will support young people to develop skills, confidence and interest in digital technologies,"

However, these changes will lead to digital technology being taught as a non-academic vocational subject alongside woodwork.

   

Rather than integrating digital technologies into all aspects of the curriculum, students      will continue to be educationally disadvantaged and under-skilled for changes in society they will encounter.

We should be incorporating digital technologies into the classroom not because we wish to predict the nature of jobs in an uncertain future, but because these technologies are not part of the very framework of our learners reality.

These changes are happening now and this is where the second major development in the digital environment in the last week comes in. Pokémon Go has taken New Zealand. This augmented reality game is an illustration that digital technology is becoming ubiquitous and not just a means to obtain a job.

However, I do have a concern with digital technology and how it is incorporated into learning. The root origin of the word education is educere, which means to care for, nourish, cause to grow. To educate, then, does not mean merely to inject with knowledge but to help to master the process of investigation, what knowledge is for.

So I thought about my students: Are they passive consumers or active creators? Learning is more than listening and regurgitating back in an assessment. The advantage of students doing the learning themselves is that other areas like procedural content knowledge can be taught and embedded.

Educator Sharon Bowman says that,

"Learning is fundamentally an act of creation, not consumption of information."

Can my students be scientists, not just recall what has already happened? Can they engage in civil discourse, and be part of compassionate communities? Can they create a movie and not just critique a film? Can technology help assist in this?

In thinking of this, I thought what is the purpose of science education? Is it to discover science for themselves to explore the physical world with skills they develop? or is it to become aware of the body of knowledge that is science so they can build upon it?

My students can multiply numbers written in scientific notation. They know the differences among alleles, genes, and chromosomes. These are ideas that have been explained from the front of the room or about which students have read from the textbook. The  students write the information in their notebooks or type on their computers, we go over it close to test time, then parrot it back at that the end of the year. In our overloaded curriculum, we count this as successful learning and move on.

However is this successful learning? This is where Pokémon go comes in. Are we convinced that having students (and citizens) as passive consumers is best? We have been introduced to the idea that our students are 'digital natives' - a person born or brought up during the age of digital technology and so familiar with computers and the Internet from an early age. However, as Pokémon go has illustrated, most are just passive consumers rather than active creators.

So how can technology be integrated into my classroom to transform learners from consumers to creators of knowledge?

• Ask students to edit their own work. We can place a dot at the end of the line in a lab write-up where there's an issue, but they have to find it and correct it. Whoever does the editing, does the learning. Technology allows to see the iterative process.
• Role play with inanimate objects. Create a whole-class representation of a chemical process. Record digitally and allow students to critique.
• Ask students to build physical models of abstract ideas like the atom. We may not be able to imagine them ourselves, but that doesn't mean our students can't do it really well. Technology can be used to record the physical models and allow comparison.

Project-based learning still requires direct instruction as the students still require a framework to build on. Students learn best when direct instruction is linked to the project. When making broader, richer scientific judgments, those taught experimental design from direct instruction performed as well as those who discover the method on their own.

However, this method provides more opportunities for true creation than simply listening and repeating content and an opportunity to develop skills around team work and self management and also provide more real world learning related to what learners will experience later in life.

It would be pertinent to start gathering great questions with which to inspire our students, but on which we can hook them into learning and create more real world contexts:

• How do we clean up the local water supply?
• Using tools of the 1700s, how can we prove the earth is round?
• Are there more than three dimensions?
• Can we make the physiology of the human body more efficient?
• How does the sun's energy get into our human bodies?

Digital technologies can allow us to find new ways to answer these questions, find experts that we can not bring into the classroom, to allow conversations with others to create new questions and develop unforeseen solutions though unexpected digital connections.

In our classrooms we should value every student and what each brings. The consumption of content should be diminished as to provide meaning to the learning. Learners grow a moment at a time. Ask questions instead of providing an immediate answer, facilitating an experience in which students build understanding to solve a problem, making students a part of their own story. In doing so, you'll create something new in you, too; it's a journey shared.