Educational Leadership - September 2009

Digitally Speaking
Bill Ferriter
Taking the Digital Plunge

Educational Leadership announces a new column—Digitally Speaking—and a new columnist, Bill Ferriter. Bill is a 6th grade language arts and social studies teacher, writer of the blog The Tempered Radical, and an enthusiastic proponent of using digital technology in teaching. In this column, Bill will share how-tos about using digital tools in the classroom. He’ll highlight resources, suggest ways to get around problems, and showcase teachers who are using technology in innovative ways.

For those who don’t know me, I’m a teacher and digital junkie. I’m the Twitter groupie in the back of the teachers workroom

who’s constantly complaining about the district firewall and who’s booked the computer lab for 16 straight weeks.

But I make no apologies for my computer obsession. With little more than a high-speed Internet connection and a bit of moxie, I’ve built a network of innovative colearners with whom I collaborate regularly, although I’ve never met any of them in person. I consider experimenting fearlessly with digital connections to be part of my job as a teacher.

One powerful aspect of 21st century learning is the fact that anyone with an Internet connection can find like-minded peers to learn from using such free tools as blogs and RSS feeds. What I like the best about my digital learning network is that it’s spread across continents. Clay Burell is Korea’s best kept secret, asking provocative questions about the changing nature of schooling. Jenny Luca is an Aussie dynamo, encouraging teachers to create meaningful service learning projects. Kevin Jarrett runs one of the most inventive elementary-level computer labs in New Jersey.

Connecting with colleagues online has helped me explore skills and dispositions necessary for

networked cooperation—skills like finding partners beyond borders, making my own thinking transparent, revising positions on the basis of feedback, accessing valuable information from colearners, and creating shared content. It has profoundly changed the way I learn.

Aren’t these the kinds of skills our students must develop? Don’t today’s 12-year-olds need to recognize that future coworkers are just as likely to live on the other side of the world as on the

I experiment with every
new tool that bursts
onto the teenage radar.

other side of town? Wouldn’t young adults truly prepared for the 21st century have experience using computers to learn with—rather than simply about—the world?

Sure they would—and ironically, even our youngest students often have more knowledge about the logistics of electronic networking than we do. Consider these statistics about students ages 12–17 from a 2007 report by the Pew Internet and American Life project1:

; 59 percent share artistic creations online by creating videos, making Web pages, maintaining blogs, or remixing online content.

; 55 percent have created profiles on social networking sites like Facebook, and 47 percent have posted images on interactive photo-sharing sites.

Despite what they’ll tell you, however, there’s not a lot of thoughtful discourse going on among teenagers blasting their way through Halo on their PlayStations. And skimming through a sample of typical Facebook pages would leave most teachers convinced that electronic conversations are nothing more than mindless nonsense.