Week 2 Assignment: A New Pedagogy?
Will Richardson does have much to say about the benefit of using weblogs in education for student learning. In our text, he lists six advantages of weblogs: provide a constructivist tool for learning, expand the classroom, facilitate reflection and metacognition, support different learning styles, develop expertise on a specific topic, and help students develop skills that will help them throughout life (Richardson, 2010, pg 26 -27). There is potential in all of these areas but not unless teachers see the value of incorporating the technology in their classrooms. For this reason, I read entries in Richardson’s blog dealing with the professional development of teachers and how to best help educators realize the potential of the technology.
Professional development for teachers comes in many forms, but the most common is the workshop model where only a few hours, days or weeks are dedicated to a specific topic. The blog I read, “Continual, Collaborative, on the Job Learning” mentions that research shows that these models do not increase student achievement. Professional development models that are ongoing over time (6 to 7 months) produce better results. Recommended is a change in the professional development model with weblogs used to help teachers build a sense of community within the profession without the time constraint of focused workshops. The technology allows participation more frequently with a wider audience.
I do agree with Richardson that there is great potential for the use of weblogs to help teachers communicate with a much wider audience of fellow professionals. Teachers in the public K-12 system have little time during the day to communicate with fellow teachers and probably don’t have the time or means to attend workshops outside of those sponsored by a district during professional development days. Professional development online allows a less time-structured model that can be sustained over time. I also agree that teachers need to learn by using the new technology – a workshop on how to use a weblog would not be as effective as a professional development course on a topic teachers are interested in that uses a weblog effectively. A potential difficulty is getting teachers who are not familiar with the technology “up to speed”, which means some sort of instruction on how to use the technology.
I disagree with a few statements about the lack of training in technology in his blog post “Well-Trained Teachers”. The author states that millions of people bought the iPad and didn’t need training on how to use it but teachers won’t use it unless they have training. “We’ve done the same thing to our teachers that we’re doing to our kids, namely conditioned them to wait for direction on what to learn, how to learn it, and how to show they’ve learned it.” Teachers in K-12 are learning on the job every day in many areas such as community building in classrooms that are overenrolled, school law concerning a variety of issues students and their families have that are non-education related but affect students’ educational performance, learning teaching strategies for the wide variety of students classified special needs in any classroom (English language learners, learning disabilities, etc.), not to mention learning in their content area. I don’t think teachers are waiting to be told what to learn or resisting technology – they are instead working as hard as they can to help students learn as much as they can in a system that is underfunded and understaffed. There just isn’t a lot of time to explore new technologies in the day-to-day hectic life of a teacher.
