I recently wrote about how utterly boring a lot of educational ICT (information and communications technology) lessons are. Many of the lessons in which ICT is taught as a subject in its own right are boring. Many of the lessons in which the educational technology is just a means to an end consist of mundane activities. Surely something can be done to inject a bit of life into these exercises in tedium?

Fortunately, there is, and this week and next I'd like to make some suggestions. Accept them, reject them, build upon them -- do as you see fit, but do think about them. This week, what can be done for ICT itself? The obvious answer these days would be to come out with that well-worn mantra, "Web 2.0". Don't misunderstand me: I'm really big on Web 2.0, but just giving your students a blog, or letting them loose on a wiki, is not going to achieve an awful lot. What you actually need to do is get them thinking, and that involves doing a bit of thinking yourself.

It's quite hard thinking differently, because we get into habits of thought and then forget that we've done so. It's all very well people saying you've got to think outside the box, but what if you can't even see that you're in a box?
One thing I have tried, to great effect, is to delegate whole units of work to members of my team. I mean, delegate everything apart from the learning objectives, which have been set somewhere else and by someone else usually. So, let's take an example. If we look at the NETS standards for students, the section on Communication and Collaboration reads:

Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others. Students:

• interact, collaborate, and publish with peers, experts, or others employing a variety of digital environments
  and media
• communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences using a variety of media and formats
• develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures
• contribute to project teams to produce original works or solve problems."

There are 6 sections altogether, which means that in a one-year course, you have approximately 6 weeks to teach each one. So, with that one, what I would do is ask for a teacher on my team to take that on. Obviously, everyone can contribute, because you don't want the team member floundering and coming up with nothing, but in my experience people start to become quite creative. Why? I think the reason is obvious. You're saying to them, "This is your unit. Do what you like with it. Push the boat out. Go a bit nuts if you want to. The only constraints are (a) you have to make sure the students acquire those skills listed, and (b) you have 6 weeks in which to do it." I guarantee that unless the teacher who takes it on is a clone of yourself, they will come up with ideas that you'd never have thought of yourself.

Another "trick" is to take the most boring-sounding parts of the course and go to town on them. Devote team meetings for brainstorming about them. Bring in colleagues from outside your area of expertise, like a history teacher. If you teach in a high school, ask an elementary school teacher to help you. Take, for example, this objective:
"Advocate and practice safe, legal, and responsible use of information and technology."

If you think about it, it's pretty silly. Nobody in their right minds is going to "advocate" anything else. But what does it even mean? Presumably, if I tell my students to make sure they only use pictures that they have permission to use, I am advocating legal use etc. Yawn. There must be something different and exciting you can do with that, to make the topic interesting.

How about coming up with a scenario in which the boundaries are not as clear-cut as that objective suggests? For example, in the UK "wall surfing", which is connecting to the internet by using someone else's wireless connection without permission, is illegal. But suppose I desperately need to send someone a message that could save their life, and the only way I could get a connection was by wall surfing. Should I do what is legally right, or what is morally responsible? I have no idea, and neither does anybody else, but the point here is that a discussion about that would generate interest, and would also entail actually finding out what is legal and what isn't. For all I know, there may be a sub-clause buried somewhere deep within the Act that made wall surfing illegal that says it's fine to do it if somebody's life is at risk.

Nothing can be lost by trying things like this. The worst thing you could do is to carry on teaching stuff in the same old way just because it's familiar. Dare to be different!

Terry Freedman is a U.K.-based education technology consultant and publishes the ICT in Education website at www.ictineducation.org, and the electronic newsletter “Computers in Classrooms."

POSTED ON HOTCHALK.COM

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