Hyperlinking Brains

A few years ago, before GRACE began to implement our one to one laptop program, our wonderful IT trainer, Diane, began talking to us about kids brains being wired different from ours because of their lifelong exposure to technology.  She sent us articles that described the students as “digital natives” while we were classified as “digital immigrants.” 

One of the things that stood out to me in this discussion was that they liked to learn with hyperlinks.  If you don’t know, hyperlinks are what you see when you read a page on wikipedia.  It allows you to have choices while you are reading because you can choose to continue on the page you are reading or click on the word that seems more interesting or that you didn’t understand.  When I was a kid, if I was reading a passage in the textbook and encountered a word I didn’t know, I would have to take the initiative to look it up in the dictionary.  Let’s be honest, most of us didn’t.  We just skipped the word and hoped context would be our friend.  If a kid is reading a website and come across a word that they don’t know, they can usually click on it and be taken to a page about that word.

There are certainly drawbacks to this in the sense that you can end up going down the rabbit hole and never finish the passage you were supposed to be reading.  However, the great benefit of this is that you will pay attention to what you are reading because you chose to read it. 

I spent a long time trying to figure out how to teach in a way that would take advantage of their hyperlink thinking.  If I could figure it out, I could teach beyond my curriculum guide, interest the kids, keep their attention, give them choices in what they learned (sort of - because I do still have to cover what is my curriculum), and give a bit of self pacing.  The problem was, I couldn’t figure it out.  How was I supposed to arrange my notes to let them jump to what interested them? 
I tried including links in my keynote and giving them choices about what to go to next, but that fell apart pretty quickly.  I teach science, and some things really depend on what you learned before that.  Jumping over the foundation wasn’t going to work.
I tried KWL sheets.  Tell me what you Know and what you Want to know.  (L means tell me what you learned, but nobody ever gets to that part.)  This didn’t work at all.
I design all my projects with some choices, but that wasn’t really taking advantage of this hyperlink idea.

We were three years into our one to one program, and I still hadn’t grabbed onto an idea that really worked.  Each kid has their own laptop, so it should be easier; but I just couldn’t land on an idea that really represented what I hoped to achieve.

A year ago, the school sent the science department to a free three hour workshop on Apple Apps.  I don’t remember everything I learned at this workshop.  I mostly remember two things.  First, the newest business buzzword must be leverage as a verb.  She must have told us these were things we could “leverage with our students” 941 times in the three hour class.  At point I thought I could teach her what leverage meant by actually hitting her with a lever, but we were learning good things in spite of it; so I held back.

The thing I left most excited about was the App called iBooks Author.  As she described writing your own digital textbooks, I turned to my friend and said, “We could do this.”  In my first 11 years at GRACE, I had 8th grade physical science textbooks that I didn’t use at all.  Ask my kids; we may have opened the book twice during the year.  Some years, I didn’t even check them out to them because it seemed silly to have them carry them when we didn’t use them.  I didn’t like the books because they rarely arranged the material in the order I thought best to teach it.  They often overemphasized points I found trivial and under-emphasized points I found critical.  I e-mailed our administration and tech people from the workshop, telling them that I would like to write my own textbook, because I knew telling them would force me to follow through.

I sort of began writing during the school year, but it was pretty slow progress because I still had normal things to do.  I took it on as a summer project.  It took far longer than I anticipated.  You think you know something well that you have been teaching for sixteen years, but it is difficult to sum it up when writing.  I also wanted to use pictures and videos and links, so that took some time.  At the end of the summer, I was completely finished with first semester and about two chapters into second semester.  I exported first semester and handed it out on jump drives to the kids.  This turned out to be better anyway because of the file size.  I continued writing a bit on weekends and finally finished the second semester book on New Year’s Day.  I can give this out to the kids our first day back. 

I have just realized how long this blog post is, so I am going to save the evaluation of all this for my next post.