passion | Jeannine St. Amand

There’s an excellent learning event underway for NB educators in Fredericton this week. LearnEast 2.0.11, a high quality, low cost event attended by 200 keen teachers from around the province, has been organized by Bryan Facey (@Faceyman) and Jeff Whipple (@jeffwhipple) of District 18 and Jay Colpitts (@JayColpitts) of District 14. I was happy to be asked to sit on a panel this afternoon and discuss my views (a parent’s perspective) on 21C and virtual learning opportunities for NB students.

In advocating for 21C and virtual spaces I outlined three areas where our modern tools can significantly improve our public education system. Acknowledging that 21C type learning doesn’t require a tech-rich environment, I commented that tech tools and the internet do however enable us to make so many more connections that strengthen the role of public education.

1) Connecting students to their passions – our modern tools allow us to make personalized learning possible. We can go beyond differentiated instruction, beyond ability grouping and reach out and touch the passions of every student of every ability in every school.

2) Connecting parents to the learning in classrooms – be it through inviting comments on a student/class blog, contributing ideas to a school wiki or skyping in from the office to provide real-world perspective on a discussion in the classroom – technology allows parents to interact with the learning in schools that goes far beyond reading comments on a report card or signing off a homework sheet.

3) Connecting the community to the school and the school to the world – the role of public education can be enhanced significantly by building connections between our local resources and our schools as well as by linking our schools to other communities around the world. Many teachers have utilized local/global partners to enhance classroom learning, but the ability to do this virtually expands our capability tremendously and really enables us to authenticate public education as a community building institution.

I summarized my contribution by paraphrasing Stephen Downes (@downes) and encouraging the group to embrace a system where students do not have an education provided for them, but one that empowers students to build an education for themselves.

Today I read an old post by Konrad Glogowski on passion based learning (found via Remote Access) that stopped me in my tracks. The following passage says so much about what we need to be considering:

Today, however, we tend to think that using online tools that appeal to young people will automatically ensure their engagement. Genuine passion cannot be ignited with a podcast or a blog. Instead, we need to give our students the freedom to learn and engage with ideas that they find relevant and important.

My interest in blogging comes from wanting to learn more about engagement of parents and students. Coming into this I knew ”it’s not the tools, it’s what you do with them“, but I was thinking in terms of having parents and students take greater interest in education because they were participating in it. Now I hope we can go even further – all the way to schools that ignite passion.

I think the idea of giving a student the freedom to find his/her passion resonates with me because my son has the opportunity to pick a subject or topic for a project that he can work on independently when he has completed his regular class work, and he will have access to a computer (not sure what that means in terms of web tools yet).

Problem - our discussion of passion revealed he didn’t really understand what I was getting at. (So I had him look up the meaning of the word online without thinking of how else the word is used - I had to think quickly to get out of that jam). We finally made some progress when we discussed what he was interested in learning about.

In the absence of knowing ones passions can we substitute interests? Perhaps as a child explores interests they will become passions over time. So far we have determined his interests are figuring things out, puzzles, mazes, codes and making things.

As he would like to use the computer for this learning we’ve looked for some possible resources, but so far much of what I’ve found would amount to him “playing” online. He doesn’t really want to do a “history of” research piece – he wants to make something.

So, I’d welcome any suggestions you may have (other than Scratch which he uses a lot at home)…