Unlock with PatreonThe Problem with CI
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inklewriter
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7 thoughts on “inklewriter”
Hi Sabrina,
We must have seen the same thread on the moreTPRS listserv. I wanted to try it out right away, it seems really intriguing. However, I get the impression that it is quite labor intensive to create a story with all these options. I don’t think I have the energy right now to play around with it. But you’re right, it looks like it has great potential – will save it for a rainy day in the summer.
Hi Brigitte,
Yes, your impressions seem to be substantiated. I tried it myself but just got impatient and put it off for a while. The final result, the story and subsequent questions seemed like a good reinforcement of CI in a visual way and as another disguised form of reading. And since technology is something that administrators are looking for in our classrooms, this seemed like it would meet that requirement. But to be Ben’s parrot I do agree that simplicity trumps everything. We’ll have to experiment with it a little more be4 we toss it completely.
Wishing you an outstanding ci week Brigitte!
I’m for it, if it can be tamed, of course. I am glad this came up, because the core thought here, for me, is how we all at some point in our careers work too hard. We go kind of nuts, some of us. I was crazy for 20 years with this stuff. I thought that was what teaching was – the kids sit there and I try with superhuman effort to reach them with whatever I can muster while they don’t have to do much more than sit there. Enter jGR and the end of those days. More balance back and forth between them and me. Much more balance. Now, the blessing that comes with CI is that it doesn’t even work if we are crazy. We have to settle down and breathe and follow subtle scents/pathways to make it work. It’s a big change. We have to relax to make this stuff work. We can’t be crazy anymore. So let’s all make it a simple week! Unless we like being nervous all the time.
I’m not going back until Wednesday :-). But I’ll make sure it will be an “outstanding CI” week, since I lost almost three days the week before the break trying to rein in those iPads that I was “chosen” to use with my 9th graders. When I first read about inklewriter, I thought it might prove useful to satisfy our tech-obsessed district. But I have come to the realization that nothing, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, trumps hanging out with the kids and BSing in the TL (thanks Chris!).
I haven’t checked it out yet but if it’s labor intensive I’m out. John would say the same. There is so much out there right now and most if it, great though it may be, has the potential of being so great that we end up losing our group’s oft repeated stated quest, which I consider almost a sacred bond, to use comprehension based instruction in the service of simplicity. Textivate is a great example of tech used reasonably in the service of comprehensible input.
This time we are in now in education is perhaps described best by the President of Bard College, Leon Botstein, who put it quite simply: “The American high school is obsolete”. That must make teachers obsolete. I think he meant that the model currently used in high schools is obsolete.
We certainly are not obsolete. We are bringing the change. Botstein, I’m sure, was referring to the tomblike silence of classrooms, where kids suffer so much in silence. I think one reason for that is too many new ideas, too many superstar tech teachers, too many top down messages, too much technological complexity, not enough human interaction.
Like Michael Fullan said, “What would happen if we treated the student as someone who mattered in the introduction and implementation of reform in schools?” Well we do that, with jGR.
Here’s the key point in this mini-ramble: anything in the way of technology that takes us away from the sweet dialogue of a properly done story or PQA session (the HUMAN part) is not going to help us. It ain’t.
I participate in a couple of German-English groups online. In one of them one of the participants posted a link to a German article about teaching. It was a very good article, and there were four take-aways for me.
1. “The thing that counts in education is the individual teacher.” New Zealand researcher John Hattie studied 800 Metastudies. With the studies that were included in the Metastudies, 500,000 studies involving about 250 Million students were considered. The importance of the teacher came through in all of the studies. Nothing – not financial resources, not learning styles, not student-centeredness, not educational reform, not public vs private – nothing is as important as the individual classroom teacher in determining what students learn. [So shouldn’t the classroom teacher be getting the support and training?]
2. “The strongest motivational drug for a human being is another human being.” [This from Joachim Bauer, the first German physician to write about the “mirror neuron” discovered by Giacomo Rizzolatti.] That is, someone who says, “I see you”. [Think of the way the term is used in Avatar when the Na’vi say “I see you.”]
3. Similar to Bauer’s comments, eight Swedish teachers who were chosen to turn around a particularly problematic ninth-grade class reported that the decisive elements in their success were Respect, Challenge, Authority and Love – love for their subject and love for their students.
4. In response to the question of what teachers most desperately wish for themselves in order to improve instruction, every one of them – from primary school through all forms of secondary schools – answered: Time. Time for the class. Time for the material. Time for the individual students.
For any of the German speakers in the PLC, here’s the URL –
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/bildung/lobrede-auf-den-lehrer-motivationsdroge-mensch-1.1603652
Danke, Robert! Der Artikel wird ausgeschnitten, eingerahmt und für jeden sichtbar aufgehängt!!