When I started teaching in 2010, I was all about integrating technology into my classroom, but as my career has progressed, I think very differently about just what that means. At first, I was using applications and the internet for engagement to substitute for traditional instruction. But I now use technology almost exclusively for lifelong learning and career readiness.
Fortunately, early in my career I worked at a school that allowed me a lot of autonomy in my classroom, which inspired me to try a lot of things--technologically speaking--that I might not have otherwise. I ran a BYOD classroom, where students knew they'd be asked to try new things and be assessed in untraditional ways. I tirelessly scoured Twitter's #edtech and #sschat hashtags for new applications and cool projects.
One of my early projects was a Twitter project on the founding fathers where I gave each one of my students a founding father and had them play him on Twitter. We read the federalist papers, and the students had to react if they were one of these founding fathers. This is a good example of how I was only using technology as a substitution for traditional learning. While it might not have been as much fun, I assume my students would have learned the federalist papers and their implications similarly had we held as discussion or a simulation.
Projects like that made me excited about the possibilities of using social media for learning (hence the title of this blog), so naturally, I took it to it's next logical step. I decided to run my entire class off of Facebook in 2011 when Facebook allowed users to join groups without being friends. When I ran this project, I wrote a long blog post on it here, so I'll spare you all the details to just say, it went really well for quite a few months (like all great methods of running a classroom, eventually the students got tired of it.). Nevertheless, it had a few distinct advantages: 1) I was the first person to reach the students in the evening when I assigned homework and 2) It was perfect for collaborative work. But what was most useful is that it acted like a discussion board when we weren't discussing in person. In the evenings, we could have "academic" conversations about what was going on in the worlds or at my school. Nevertheless, most--but not all--of these conversations were driven by me, the teacher. But there was one example that changed my thinking about technology.
The best experience on Facebook groups was when we had a digital conversation after Obama ordered the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. For whatever reason, a number of my students ran to my Facebook group to talk this through. I wish I could always be present for conversations when important/controversial news breaks. Students need and want to have an adult present who is informed and can act as a mediator/fact-checker for tough conversations (especially political ones).
Though I didn't realize it at the time, it was this experience that pushed me to keep using technology--and specifically social media--in my classroom. While many of my other attempts to integrate technology were simply me adding technology to an existing lesson or method of instruction, this was different. I was changing the way students consumed, and thought critically about the world around them. In this way, I had created a space where learning could be continuous and it would span more than just classroom topics.
Perhaps the best way to think about my technology integration is with Dr. Ruben Puentedura's SAMR model. His model pushes teachers to shoot to go up the SAMR chart from Substitution to Augmentation to Modification to Redefinition. With my early technology project, I was on level 1, S, Substitution. But that one experience on Facebook taught me that I can reach the, R, Redefine with social media.
Since then, in my quest to "redefine" learning, I've tried to set up spaces like the Facebook groups I started back in 2011 where students pursue learning outside their classroom and seek discussion where they can opine, consider and synthesize information. This has forced me to write new courses, create new resources and eschew a lot of the traditional curriculum that schools are still teaching. I've currently landed on a class called "Disruptive Innovation thru Social Media" that has students build personalized learning networks where they can consume information related to their interests. I've helped them build professional networks where they can consume information and converse about that information with an informed following. You can read a little more about my effort to teach social media here. Long story short, I'm trying to recreate my Facebook groups experience and make it self sustaining for my students.
But perhaps most importantly, I'm also trying to raise digital citizens who learn, curate, create, share and collaborate in digital spaces with informed users. This helps students develop passions about which they are informed and it helps them build a positive digital portfolio--one that will help them become an informed professional in a network that they're interested in.
This transition from substitution to redefinition has taken me a number of years and a number of failures, but this growth has totally changed how I see secondary education. Now I spend less time in #edtech and #sschat and more time in #digcit and #medialiteracy. I hope that in writing about my #edtech evolution, other teachers can bypass a lot of those years of experimentation and failure, and move up the SAMR model quicker and with a purpose that it took me a while to find.
