Last week, I had the honor of sitting in on an episode of Mozilla’s Curriculum Workshop, a regular webinar where folks talk but also (and more importantly) do a little prototyping to begin building things that might be useful to helping folks make and learn with the Web.
The active format is great, and I’m a fan of the hosts, so it was cool to join in to talk and iterate a bit around summer learning opportunities. The format reminded of the old EdTechTalk Barn Raising sessions. I wish more conversations were framed as participatory and with a making focus.
I continue to be deeply concerned that the time when professional educators are “allowed” to spend time in deep learning is summertime. If the job of a learning organization is to promote learning, it sure seems to me that avoiding learning until down time or off time is unhealthy and a terrible model for sustainability. At best, it’s just poor modeling for schools to tell children that learning is so important, teachers are too busy to do so until after their “work” is done.
But editorializing aside, it was fun to visit and build some. Here’s a recap of the webinar, and the video is below.
I sure hope you’re making and learning on something good this summer. I’d love to hear what you’re up to.
Your statement “to tell children that learning is so important, teachers are too busy to do so until after their “work” is done,” is brilliant. I was in the classroom for nearly 20 years and one of the reasons I needed to explore other professions is just that statement. I wrote curriculum, I helped with CC legislature here in CA and I was the only teacher at my school to get TOY two years in a row. None of those things seemed to matter. I still did not feel as though I was seen as a professional. At the end of the day that was ok – some of that stuff is ego driven and I didn’t care as long as students were learning to want to be excellent. So, I have gone to the other side. I am now in Ed Tech (which has obviously led me to your website). The democratic classroom can look like many things and “democratic” at it’s core means adaptability. I am on the Jupiter Ed team. If you have never seen it or heard about it, you may be interested in our all in one, end to end solution because it fits a democratic model. It is intuitive, adaptive and progressive.
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I quite like this, it works well for me thank you very much