This past Monday and Tuesday, I interviewed nine sixth-grade students during their lunch break to discuss digital literacy and learning at our school. We entered the student services conference room where I conducted the interview, and sat down in high-backed chairs circled around a large table, surrounded by whiteboards. One student excitedly whispered, “Wow! It’s like we’re at a business meeting or something!” making me realize that it’s not often that we respectfully ask students for their input on big decisions about what we teach and how we teach, and really listen to them.
As I posed a set of questions about technology, teaching, and school improvement, ideas about topics ranging from teleportation to Gardner’s multiple intelligences spilled out of these clever young people. They provided some great insight about technology, pedagogy, and content, passionately expressing their ideas about how we can make education better at our school. Not only did they provide insight on how today’s youth is using technology, but they gave me some great ideas about my current educational practices and proved that by involving students in the decision-making process, students will be more engaged in learning. The technology that my students use doesn’t surprise me. They use laptops, cellphones, and gaming consoles like X-box. They also mentioned pencils, calculators, and paper as technology tools, which I think was pretty brilliant of them. My students use apps like Facetime to communicate with their friends; they use their laptops to check the homework site and look for resources their teachers have posted. (Their answers might have been swayed toward academic purposes as I’m not sure they wanted to talk about online gaming, social media, and other personal interests in front of their teacher.) When asked for suggestions about how we could make our school better, first as a broad question, and then in terms of technology use, the students gave specific, insightful feedback. Students like hands-on learning, like to learn at their own pace, appreciate differentiated learning, like using computers at school, and want learning to be fun. “Students should be put into classes by how they learn,” one student suggested. “You know, like some learn best by hearing, some by doing things by hand, or seeing things. Each teacher could be an expert on teaching a certain way.” “We have too much homework,” one student responded. “What if we had longer school days but we had less homework?” “I hate worksheets,” a young man added. “Less worksheets. More computer time.” When asked about technology in our school, students talked about the poor internet connection. (We’ve been having connectivity issues since the school year started.) They dreamed about “iPad desks,” huge movie screens, and apps on the student-response clickers that we use but they also devised “realistic goals” as they termed them. We discussed a one-to-one policy and BYOD and students acknowledged that a BYOD policy would save money for the school, but wouldn’t necessarily be fair for students who had no devices to bring. “I would feel bad for the kids who couldn’t bring it in or don’t have a phone.” They decided that a BYOD policy would be good, but that the school should provide devices for students who could not bring their own. While I appreciated learning about my students’ technology use and hearing their advice for improving the school, it was the time that I spent with them, and seeing them problem-solve and interact in a small group that I really enjoyed the most. The student conference center is free often during lunch, so I’d like to make these meetings a regular thing.
2 Comments
Ms. Z
9/21/2014 04:08:39 am
You are hilarious, Thibault! Did your mom really not believe you? I wish there were iPhone 6s in our classroom. How cool would that be? Thank you for reading my blog and for taking part in my digital learners interview. :)
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