Trajectory Coaches are flexible adaptors
I love it. J.M.’s comments to my previous, very incomplete, post have hit the internal nail I’ve been smacking around, right on the head. Thanks so much J.M. for helping to gather the right verbage.
Blogs are exciting tools. You can instantly connect with others, exchange, link to, comment on, reflect over, and then produce your own information. Doors of learning opportunity are flung wide, wide open.
The issues J.M. raises have been ones I’ve been mulling over, and one I pathetically tried to put into words with yesterday’s post. (Post became victim of one too many ideas, and not enough time to really flesh them out.) But in a nutshell:
How all this learning should look like in an unplugged classroom?
How should trajectory coaches work and look like in technology poor learning environments? Can we be trajectory coaches without a computer and broadband? Is connectivist learning theory lost on technology “have-not’s?” Is my work in the classroom somehow made lower quality, or even made ineffective if I don’t use technology? Will my students suffer from this abscence?
I think not.
Trajectory coaches are flexible adaptors. If they are not, they’ve become irrelevant.
Trajectory coaches know the tech. They’re fluent in social technology, and practice their profession informed by developing, and emerging theory. As J.M. puts it,
what does happen when their is no access to the net in the classroom? I think the same thing that has happened in education for several thousand years before the net was born into existence…the teacher becomes the net (in a sense)
— Beautiful!
“The teacher becomes the net.”
So, no net? Slow net? No computers? Outdated technology in your classroom? Yet you want to employ modern and up-to-date learning practice? You become the net.
And not only yourself: train your students to become the net as well.
I’m thinking of library visits. Newspaper and magazine subscriptions. Students taking in taped tv and radio programs. Tapping into and creating “contacts” (Oh my, is that a connectivist’s approach being used in a non-net environment?) by sending out your class to actually meet with and interview people in the community - business professionals, other teachers, parents, grandparents, city officials etc. If you can’t go out, invite those people to come in.
Trajectory coaches need not marry and become dependant upon the net to be effective. They need to be in touch with what’s happening “out there” and be creative and resourceful enough to adapt it to their classroom’s reality.
The net is a powerful tool. We just have to be careful to not limit ourselves to HAVING to use it in order to be really effective. As J.M. so aptly puts it: real teachers have been the net for thousands of years.
