Online Learning Experience

I listened to H. Songhai and his discussion, "What Did You Do in School, Yesterday, Today, and Three Years Ago?"


This short talk was quite fascinating. H. Songhai took a short trip overseas and used various methods of technology to document his trip. Upon returning to the States, he led a small group of high school students on a sightseeing trip. He was shocked and saddened to see that the kids walked around all day texting friends and listening to their iPods, but not using any of these tools to document what they were seeing and experiencing. So, one morning he shared with the students how he used his phone and iPod to document his trip. It seemed to surprise the students that they could use their gadgets for learning. This sparked H. Songhai's thinking.


As the new school year started, H. Songhai began teaching his students how to incorporate technology into their learning. He ditched paper in his classes, and hasn't fused a single piece for the last three years. All students keep up a blog to record their learning and post assignments. He calls these learning tools, "Personal Learning Networks" and has students use sites like iGoogle, Google Reader, Skype, twitter, Project Gutenberg, and Google Notebook. He is of the belief that sites like this help a student learn and grow. If a student starts a blog upon entering ninth grade, by graduation, the students will have a blog that forever documents their growth, teacher's involvement in the learning, and what exactly the student learned. He compared this to his own high school and college learning experiences. Besides his diplomas, what proof is there that he learned anything?


H. Songhai has given all his students complete freedom to take pictures, get online, download material using whatever device they have, etc during class. Each of these show the students the possibilities they have in learning. His hope is that they can take this information and apply it to their everyday lives, that they wouldn't spend all their time texting and listening to music when they can be using these same tools to expand their minds and grow.



It's just absolutely incredible to think of teaching for 3 years without using a single piece of paper! It makes so much sense though; if you think about the amount of paper you find of the floor or in the garbage, you might as well just use the Internet. I think it's very cool to hear that about a teacher showing students how to incorporate technology and learning into their everyday life. I had never thought of using screen capturing tools to archive information or use on blogs, mashups, slideshows, and class projects.