TTWWADI

What kinds of things get in the way of change in your school and your classroom?

One of the most powerful forces is TTWWADI: Thats The Way We've Always Done It. I've been making up presentations (I've got five coming up in the next 10 days) and one thing that I'm going to be talking about at several of them is TTWWADI. Which is why I found Jeff Utecht's post on this very same topic interesting.

Jeff gives the example of an end of year project with students making a website using Dreamweaver. One of the world's most powerful and widely used web design tools, its worth as a piece of software is not questioned. What is worth wondering about though is why it us being used in classrooms. Jeff is a technology teacher and acknowledges that students would be well served having the skills to do things like hack css scripts. My case is different. I am a generalist classroom teacher. When we bring technology into play, it is in social studies class or language arts class. While we could argue that "code is poetry" and that playing with code may be one of the language skills of our time, I would instead argue that the focus of these tools for me is to have students work on using design and information presentation skills instead of coding. This drops the importance of Dreamweaver down.

A lesson I learned last year. A student who was basically withdrawn from my class was one of my most prolific bloggers. As a matter of fact, she still is. Working on a project, she became interested in web design. I fired up Dreamweaver and all of its menu palettes; watching her eyes grow larger all the time. I gave her a few basic lessons and a one page tutorial I had created in the past as a basic guide and set her loose. She struggled mightily for a few days, even downloading a 30 day free software trial at home. Then one evening I got a very frustrated email from her asking to switch her project over to Piczo. I hesitated at first, then told her we would talk at school tomorrow. The next day we sat down at a machine and I had her show me some of the other things she had done at Piczo. While not giving access to fully editable css scripts, she began to show me the widgets available, how the html could be hacked, and what her plans were for this school related site.

I went with it and she didn't look back.

In the end she completed a beautifully done, informative site. What was important in this case was not the coding and the software skills, although they did come into play. What was important was the information presentation skills, the design and interplay of colours, fonts, organization, etc.

So what's important? Is the focus where it should be? The tools are out there. Use the ones you need.

technorati tags:dreamweaver, jeff, utecht, ttwwadi

Comments

[Jeff Utecht]

This is exactly why I think embedded technology skills work. I'm teaching skills without content. You are teaching content without skills. If we team teach together we have the perfect combination. I think that's part of my problem. I'm interested in the skills. The rubric I built was about presentation, layout, correct links, and very little about content. But it I could teach my skills within your content. Then their is a purpose, a reason to learn the skills, and the content. That's my hope anyway for next year.

Thanks for the conversation!

[Clarence Fisher]

Agreed. Except for the fact that I dont't believe I am teaching "content without skills." We work a lot in my classroom on meta content skills. In the age of 2.0, those skills include information presentation and architecture, lay out, fonts and coloour design, editing html, etc. etc. Your skills are more visible, while again, ours are more embedded.

[Jeff Whipple]

I like Jeff's reference to "embedded technology", but I am not so sure that we need to "teach" software per se.

I had a classroom teacher who wanted to do a Social Studies project in French who asked me for some advice/assistance. She wanted to use PowerPoint as a platform for a final project presentation. Frankly, I have been PowerPointed to death the past three years. In fact, I think most of this type of software is limiting and stifles creativity.

Instead, I encouraged her to give her students the opportunity to use whatever tools they might choose. These might include on board software or web 2.0 tools. I gave them a few examples. What is resulting (the project is still underway) is nothing short of amazing. Some students are staying with traditional platforms, others are blowing me away! SIMS movies, web pages (piczo et al), videos edited on-line…you name it! It’s been amazing to see the variety (an education for the students in and of itself) and quality (the result of student choice and buy-in).

So…do we need proprietary software. No. If it’s available, allow students to use it, if not, no biggie! Do we need to "teach" it? hmmm...

What students really need is permission. Permission to create. Permission to step out. Permission to learn.