Trust, Expectations, Responsibilty?

After my last post Mr. W directed me towards a post called "why wireless", and I really liked it. The one thing that jumped out the most though in the post was this:

"Our philosophy at Arapahoe is to have high expectations for our students, to educate them to behave ethically, responsibly and safely and then expect that they will do the right thing. When they don’t, they know we’ll have a conversation and try to learn from the mistake, but we don’t assume they are going to mess up."

I think this is a very important philosophy, there has to be an element of trust that goes along with this idea. I know that in some cases this can be difficult... with some of those "trickier" students, but I don't see why this trust can't be bestowed on the rest of us. After all, it's these years in Secondary/High School that prepare us for the outside world, and as you know, responsibility, independence and expectation are of course some of the things students are met with once they leave the safety of the school gates and venture in to the big bad world. Schools do give students good experience with this though... at least my school does. As each year has passed I've gotten more of a sense of independence and more responsibilities have been given to me and my peers, but the one thing that hasn't changed over the years is the sense or independence and responsibilities in the classroom. I think it is something that would benefit students of any age greatly, if a teacher was able to put some faith in the class and say "ok class, this week we've been learning about the American Civil War, now I want you to split in to groups, write a script for a podcast then we can record them and put them on the school website." without thinking "oh, but what if they just sit there and mess about", because at the end of the day, most students wont.

I know I keep coming back to this fear thing but it really is a major factor. There can't be trust while fear exists, meaning that if teachers are afraid that their students will either mess up or mess around when faced with this sort of technology in the classroom, then there wont be an element of trust there, and surely there's someone else out there who believes that students can be trusted? As Karl Fisch says, if/when students do mess up, or behave in an untrustworthy way surely they can be pulled aside and be talked to so that they can learn from the mess up? I'll set that question to the teachers among you... the one thing I will say though is, School is just another place of work, for both students and teachers, and a sense of trust, responsibility and expectation are major factors of success in any work place.

I really do believe that more of a sense of responsibility and trust in the classroom would benefit everyone, because at the end of the day most students are willing to learn and will live up to expectations without messing up. The main benefit of this in my eyes is it makes using technology in school a lot more comfortable, and I think it really opens up the concept of School 2.0. However, you may disagree...

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Blocked

I'm going to take some time to go back and again post about one of the most pressing issues with the school 2.0 idea... fear. As you can probably guess from the title of my post the biggest consequence is the blocking of so many useful internet tools, it's something that really gets to me in school. The one thing that gets to me most about it though is it never seems to be consistent, you can access something one day and not the other. And well, I think that this shows that the authority deciding what's to be blocked and what's not aren't quite sure themselves about it all. And surely if this is the case they need some kind of guidance?

For example, I remember for a long time I wasn't able to access blogger in school, I think the category it fell under for being blocked was either "chatrooms" or "forums", and to me, this shows that the authority for this content blocking need some sort of education about these sorts of tools, to settle in their minds what these technologies do and why they are not a risk. This is a huge task, educating so many people and making them more comfortable with the technology... in turn giving them the confidence to leave the technologies unblocked, but it's a hurdle which needs to be overcome for School 2.0 to succeed. Now of course, there's a difference in opinion, while I may not think this is asking for too much, many may disagree and say that spending the time money and effort to teach about these technologies and show they aren't a risk, then re-haul all these content filtering systems is a huge ask. However, it depends how you decide to weigh it up... from my point of view, the benefits outweigh the costs, then again, I'm not in the know when it comes to organising training and re-defining content filters in schools... but what I do know is how much potential is there, and I've seen that they can be so useful in classroom situations, and if the word of a student isn't good enough then you can wait for the results of a small experiment I'll be carrying out soon with Mr. W... but I'll tell you more about that later.

Like I said, it's just a matter of opinion, and I'll leave it to you, but I just think it's such a shame that a lot of this useful content is blocked... and especially seeing as if it remains the same, School 2.0 can't happen as we would hope it could. By now I'm sure most people are agreed on the potential of all this technology in schools. But for me, I think it's time for action, and time to really put the point across that we need to start moving forward with School 2.0, one small step at a time, my ideal starting point being with this, the blocking of such useful web technologies.

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