Liberatory Technology

One of my goals as an educator is to design curriculum and teach using technology in liberatory ways aiming toward the goal of achieving social justice in education. I have learned valuable techniques to integrate liberating technology into the curriculum from this week’s and previous week’s readings, as well as from other classes that I have taken. I would like to integrate all that I have learned in various readings and videos here in this post to consolidate my thoughts and use this document as a future tool. Ergo, I hope this synthesis is helpful for you too, my readers.

Digital Portfolios - Students can create digital portfolios of all of their work throughout the year. The easiest place to house this portfolio is a blog. Formative assessments can be used to grade the participatory learning activities with the different digital tools that the students are required to use and create projects with. Their portfolios will demonstrate what they have learned, and the teacher can assess them with a rubric for each activity or project (Pacansky-Brock, 2013).

Multimedia / Web-based Tools - In classroom learning, students should be able to access information in multiple formats – videos, articles, audio, images, etc. at the beginning of learning new content. After absorbing the material, they comment on this multimedia information in blog posts, on Twitter, Facebook, or if an article is online, such as The New York Times, the students can post a comment in the comment section. Alternatively, students can present information they have learned from the multimedia in slides on the application VoiceThread and leave audio comments about slides that have been posted. Additionally, students can collaboratively prepare Google presentations on the multimedia information they have accessed. Not only do they make their own comments regarding the information accessed, but they also respond to peer and instructor posts. The commenting process becomes a feedback loop from individual student, to peer, to instructor, and looping back again.

Blogs - As mentioned above, blogs are an ideal place where digital portfolios can be housed. A blog is a website that houses postings in written, audio, and video format and is collected in order of date. These postings can be from one person or from anyone who has permission to post, such as a class. Comments and feedback can be left on the blog for the author (Prensky, 2010). Learning activities that can be done on a blog are numerous. Blog posts for class activities and projects can include: writing, pictures of things that students have done or worked on, videos, or voice recordings. Essentially, the blog reflects everything that the student has learned over the entire school year. The value of the blog is that it is a digital record and will always remain online. If teachers and students go back and look at their portfolio from previous years, they will be able to compare the past years to the present to assess progress (Cassidy, 2013). Several specific learning activities can be implemented with blogs:

◦     Profiles - Writing profiles of historic individuals in the field related to the unit of study.

◦     Fables - Writing animal fables that lead to a one-sentence moral matching the concept that the class is currently studying.

◦     Media collection - In groups, students collect news clippings, videos, and pictures of the concept being learned, put them into their blogs and comment on the postings.

◦     Electronic role-plays - Students write diary-type entries role-playing a character related to the content (Silberman, 1996; Morrison-Shetler & Marwitz, 2001).

Facebook - In addition to the web-based tools discussed above, social media tools can also be used for learning and assessment. The first social media tool that I will discuss is using Facebook as a learning tool. Facebook is a social networking tool that has multiple learning applications.

◦     Group pages - The teacher can create a Facebook group for the class that is private and invite only. The Facebook wall of this group can be used as a class discussion board. When students make comments and replies, they will be notified on their homepage.

◦     Communication tool - Facebook is also a good tool for communicating with students quickly. If a teacher or student posts to Facebook, the message will reach students faster than an email since most students check their Facebook regularly (Silberman, 1996; Morrison-Shetler & Marwitz, 2001).

◦     Character pages - Facebook accounts can be created for fictional and historical characters, writers, inventors, scientists, etc., and students maintain these character pages by making comments and replying in the voice of the character (Prensky, 2010).

Twitter - Twitter is another tool that can be used in the classroom. Twitter is a combination of texting and social networking. It is able to receive continuously updated brief messages. Twitter has a limit of 140 characters so writing Twitter messages is an exercise in writing concisely. You can follow and receive messages from all of the people you follow on Twitter (Prensky, 2010). The following learning activities can be used with Twitter:

◦         Reports from the field - By teaching students to be activists, students can use their smart phones to record their perceptions, observations, or while witnessing an event or visiting a location that is related to the content the class is studying. Using Twitter in this manner captures honest and spontaneous reactions.

◦         Backchannels - Twitter can also be used as backchannels in large classes. Twitter can quickly become a group discussion by using hashtags. Additionally, when students miss class, they can catch up on what they missed by sending a tweet to their fellow students.

◦         Instant communication – Teachers can send out messages that will be seen immediately, for those times that quick contact with students is needed.

◦         Class groups - Groups can be created for specific classes. Along with sharing information, Twitter is also a community-building tool that creates inclusiveness and belonging.

◦         Group summaries - Twitter is also good for student summaries. In designated small groups, one student is the leader for “tweets”; this student posts the top five important concepts that the group discussed from each group session to Twitter, in separate postings. Other students follow the feed and comment to add discussion, agreements, and disagreements.

◦         Group communication – Student groups are able to communicate with each other. Twitter conversations among student groups can be a powerful brainstorming tool as it is happening away from the classroom and since Twitter is considered “cool.”

◦         Polls - Polls can be created and posted on Twitter to gather student interests, attitudes, information, and guesses.

◦         Information gathering - The teacher and students can post interesting news stories, and other websites can be linked to Twitter (Silberman, 1996; Morrison-Shetler & Marwitz, 2001).

◦         Televised tweets - The teacher can place a television monitor in the classroom to collect and highlight tweets from the students (Pacansky-Brock, 2013).

◦         A connecting tool - Twitter can also be used to connect with other classrooms around the world. Students can learn about what each other are doing, if it is the same or different, learn from each other, and tweet questions about the places they live. Connecting with others in this way expands students’ worldview and develops an empathy they would not otherwise have had (Cassidy, 2013).

YouTube - Additionally, YouTube is an excellent tool for housing and accessing short videos. There are a number of good sites to access videos, such as TeacherTube, TED Talks, School Tube, Big Think, and others. However, YouTube stands apart from all of these sites as being the most important go-to site for watching and uploading videos. YouTube is an excellent tool as it has two-way communication capabilities where viewers can respond to videos either in text or with their own videos. Students should be encouraged to find all the videos related to the concept being studied, evaluate the videos, and respond with their own comments and new videos of their own (Prensky, 2010). Activities that can be done in the classroom using YouTube are numerous.

◦     Video demonstrations - Students can record video demonstrations related to the topic the class is studying and post it to YouTube.

◦     Portfolio tool - Student projects, presentations, or speeches can be recorded on video instead of the traditional tools like PowerPoint and uploaded to YouTube for the class to view.

◦     Movie clips - Movie clips can be shown to illustrate a point and begin conversations.

◦     Embedded links - YouTube videos can be embedded into PowerPoint, and presentations with multimedia can be given anywhere there is internet access.

◦     Interactive video quizzes - Teachers can create interactive video quizzes using text boxes and link questions to other uploaded videos. In this way, instructors can create multiple choice tests that lead to differentiated video reactions, depending on the way that the student answers the question.

◦     Class account - The teacher can create a class YouTube account and give the password to everyone in the class so that students can upload their videos to the same place (Silberman, 1996; Morrison-Shetler & Marwitz, 2001).

Wikis - Finally, Wikis are another social media tool that teachers can use to enhance learning in the classroom. Wikis are simple web pages that whoever has permission can edit and change. Wikis are collaborative tools that are easy to set up and have many learning potentials (Prensky, 2010). There are various ways to use Wikis in a classroom:

◦     Group projects - As an alternative to emailing documents and PowerPoints back and forth, students can collaborate in real time with a Wiki.

◦     Share files - The teacher can set up a class Wiki to share lecture notes for students who miss class, which also is a powerful tool for studying, and they help students see content from different perspectives (Silberman, 1996; Morrison-Shetler & Marwitz, 2001).

Participatory styles of learning are mediums and strategies for representing knowledge. This method of teaching/learning with emerging technology and web-based tools speaks to me as an educator as it is innovative, disruptive, and liberatory. This learning method empowers students to learn about real-world scenarios and to make a difference in the world by fully participating in democratic society through the use of social media tools. Teaching through the medium of social media and other web-based tools gives students a voice and agency. Students learn how their participation in social media can contribute to changes in the world versus the typical status update that students (and adults) today tend to use social media for, such as “Sitting in the Wal-Mart parking lot.”

References

Cassidy, K. [TVO Parents]. (2013, May 21). Using social media in the classroom [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/riZStaz8Rno

Morrison-Shetler, A., and Marwitz, M. (2001). Teaching creatively: Ideas in action. Eden Prairie: Outernet.

Pacansky-Brock, M. (2013). Best practices for teaching with emerging technologies. New York, NY: Routledge.

Prensky, M. (2010). Teaching digital natives: Partnering for real learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Silberman, M. (1996). Active learning: 101 strategies to teach any subject. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.