Aha moments

Working with teachers can be so rewarding! You struggle away for months thinking nothing is ever going to change, then out of the blue, they just suddenly get it! One day e-learning just stops being this big noose around their necks that has no educational purpose and starts being a valid way of supporting student learning. I have been turning myself inside out for months trying to get this group to engage and understand the purpose of allowing students to make use of the e-learning strategies I have demonstrated, but suddenly the struggle is no longer there. By providing a relevant context for learning and getting teachers to suggest what their students needed to learn first, the tools and strategies became glaringly obvious. A real need to identify community practices meant a survey monkey was an obvious choice. The need for a broader appreciation of the disparate values that surround a local decision required role play. To ensure everyone's views could be heard and reheard, voicethread became a clear favourite, with the added bonus that it also provided anonymnity. To add to this, teachers suggested that digital recordings of real people in the community could be added to the voicethreads at a later date to ensure students are continually building their understanding of different values and perspectives.
I wish i could bottle this school and use it to prove that web 2.0 does have real benefits. But...it goes to prove that it all takes time. Time to overcome the fear (it really gets in the way), time to build confidence, and time to become a social being virtually. This virtual social person is very different to the one that exists in the physical world. With time, this anxiety erodes and learning recentres itself with the child rather than the teacher.