Classroom 2.0 Meet-up

I spent this past Friday at Classroom 2.0’s San Francisco meet-up, an informal conference in downtown San Francisco. It was a fairly stellar day: not only did I get to sleep in until the ungodly hour of 7 a.m. (!), but I also picked up some exciting new ideas about integrating web 2.0 technology and pedagogy into my work as a school librarian.

Tech stuff:

If I tried to summarize everything I learned and saw, I’d be here blogging all day, which I really don’t want to do, since I’ve got lessons to plan, laundry to do. Suffice it to say that I was most impressed with the five-minute mini-demos during the morning session. I hadn’t come across xtimeline before, and though I do think the site needs a major design overhaul (what’s with the teeny tiny font?) before they bring it out of beta, I love the idea of using it as a presentation format for my 5th and 6th grade library/research skills classes. I also loved the general concept of building annotated trails through the internet with Trailfire, but unfortunately, that site also needs a little work before it is simple enough to be worth using in the classroom. As far as I’m concerned, if a site takes me more than ten minutes to figure out, then it’s no longer a teaching tool, but rather an example of technology for the sake of technology. Though I’m as yet vague on how I might use them in the classroom, I had fun playing around with Twitter and PIBB. I’m curious as to how many of my students and their families use Twitter, and whether it might be worth creating an account for the school library to broadcast quick news bytes.

Pedagogy Stuff:

The day’s big take-home-message-moment for me came during a Skype discussion with Vicki Davis’s high school class in Georgia (the state, not the country). In the course of the conversation, Vicky commented that she thinks it’s important for educators to move away from what she calls “point and click teaching.” That is, rather than dragging our students one step at a time through the process of learning new web and software applications, we need to give them room to figure things out for themselves, to learn to be intuitive learners.

I’ll admit that my teaching style does sometimes veer a little towards the “point and click,” in that I have a tendency to walk my students through each minute step of the particular skill I hope to teach, whether it’s using the library catalog or searching for newspaper articles in one of our electronic databases. There’s a clear reason that I do this — namely time pressure. There’s only so much one can accomplish, after all, in a 30-45 minute class period. But given the rapidly changing nature of technology, it probably is more important for students to develop meta-cognitive inquiry skills — to grow in their understanding of how information-search systems and interfaces function in general, rather than how our specific OPACs, databases, and websites work at a particular moment in time. And the best way for them to do that is, as Davis points out, through self-directed inquiry. I need to think about how I can shift my pedagogical style in this direction, while still offering helpful advice and structure during class sessions.