Teachers' Forum in Germany, December 2010: Highlights

The 2nd Teachers' Forum took place today in Berlin, Germany as part of the Online Educa Berlin Conference. The audience consisted primarily of secondary school teachers from German schools together with a broad mix of OEB conference delegates. The first keynote speaker, Duane Snider from the Rosetta Stone, traced technological milestones throughout the ages - the printing press, the telephone, the television, videos, etc. and demonstrated that - from the dawn of time - there has been one style of teaching which dictated how teachers teach and how students learn. Namely "The expert teaches the pupil, who aspires to absorb the teacher's learning and eventually become an expert themselves." Yet, the technological developments that have taken place over the last two decades are turning this traditional approach on its head and are threatening to render it obsolete: The days of "the sage on the stage" are numbered... 
 

'Just-in-case' versus 'just-in-time' learners
 

Former generations of learners diligently listened to the information they received from their teachers, memorizing huge chunks of it so that they could repeat it, at will, when needed: these were the 'just-in-case' learners. 

Today's generation of learners tend to learn in 10 to 15-minute sprints where they find as much as they wish on the web about a certain topic, as and when they need it. In short they "...search - scan - snip - share - store - and access the information'.  These are the 'just-in-time' learners.

The upshot of this in the classroom is that our (traditional) methods of teaching are now at odds with what we are asking our children to learn and how we are asking them to learn it, so we need to meet each other in the middle somewhere and develop exciting new types of learning:

"...The current technologies are challenging the old pedagogy: we need a new technogogy."
 

How to get there in 5 (easy) steps
 

Snider advocated a 5-step process. Step 1 involved the teacher 'leaving the stage'. Step 2 required the teacher to learn from his or her students: i.e. to find out through them what they have learned and how they learned it. This would enable the 'digital immigrants' to lead the classroom revolution. Step 3 involved the teacher taking responsibility for incorporating the new technologies fully into his or her own life. In this way, they could 'lead' the revolution in the classroom. Step 4 required the teacher to delegate responsibility to the student: make them devote time to learning the task at hand with the new ICT tools, and Step 5 - very important - the teachers must not abdicate responsibility as a teacher: "We need to stop being surprised at what students do with the technology."

Snider eloquently summed up the situation teachers are now in with an anecdote about Gandhi: "One day, Ghandi was stopped on the wayside when he was out with his followers by a young man who wished to speak to him. His followers simply kept on walking ahead, so at one point Gandhi turned to the young man and said : "There go my people: I need to run and catch up because I am their leader."  This, according to Snider, should be the teachers' maxim in the digital age! 
 

Teacher Training Videos
 

The second keynote speaker at the Teachers' Forum, Russell Stannard, from the University of Warwick in the UK, demonstrated how many of the resouces on his award-winning website Teachertrainingvideos.com can be used by teachers to save time and trees. Russell's quest is to track down new technologies, test them, make a video of himself using the technology in question, and then place this video on the Teachertrainingvideos.com site to demonstrate how to use the tool to other teachers worldwide.  People now send him lots of videos and educational tools to test and his website gets 1000 hits a day as people visit it to download the videos he strongly recommends. He has found some great innovative uses for them. For example, today, he corrects his students course work on video, not on a paper-print-out. Russell also strongly advocates a language website called 'storybird' and other tools such as jing, althoug good alternatives to Jing are Screen Jelly and Screen Toaster. Check them out!
 

"If the learners have interest, then learning happens" (Arthur C. Clarke)
 

Having braved the snows of North-East England to travel to Berlin, Professor Sugata Mitra was able to deliver his keynote presentation later in the day. He  began by outlining a study he carried out to compare the attitudes of schoolchildren from as far away as India and the UK, and underlined how this was often strongly influenced by their own personal circumstances. For example: in the North-East of England a child commented "Why should I work hard to be a professor when I can earn as much as you by driving a bus? " while in India a child at a poorly-resourced school commented "The internet is down because the school did not pay". Based on these and other comments by the children, Mitra was able to narrow the issue down to two problems:  a lack of relevance and aspiration among children in countries that have have adequate resources. and problems of a lack of resources among children in the developing world. 

Mitra was also able to distinguish between two different types of 'remoteness': the geographical remoteness of many schools in India, and the social and economic remoteness of schools that are located in built-up, run-down, and densely populated council estates in North-East England. This led to the hypothesis that if the overall problem was some form of 'remoteness', then the solution could be the same! Another observation was that it is the children living in the remotest areas that need teachers most badly. Yet good teachers are usually absent from the very places that need them most!

The Hyderabad Experiment was conducted by Mitra in South India in 2002. Hyderabad is an interesting state: it has thousands of small private schools for the poor. The schools are very popular because they teach good English (which is usually the ticket to a good job in later life). The local language is Telugu and the children ended up speaking English with a heavy Telugu accent. Professor Mitra gave them a 'Speak to Text' programme, but deliberately left them to their own devices for two months without giving them any instructions at all to see how they would progress when unsupervised. The result: the children invented their own pedagogy. His overall conclusion, based on this and subsequent studies, is that:

"Groups of children can navigate the internet to achieve educational objectives on their own". Sugata Mitra.

However, Professor Mitra was also quick to point out to the audience: 'This is not my invention: I am only repeating to you what the children of two continents taught me."

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