Consultant gives crash course on cyberspace as teaching tool

Hundreds of Modesto City Schools teachers packed into the Downey High School auditorium Wednesday morning to then pack in a lot of information on education technology.

For about two hours, Harvard-educated consultant Alan November shared research, tips, examples and stories to help the seventh- through 12th-grade instructors harness the power of the internet. He showed them how to use search engines at an academic level and urged them to teach their students the same.

“He talked about how to really engage students in (online) searches to promote academic conversations,” said Greg Havens, digital instruction coach at Davis High School. “... One example was finding a PDF about Shakespeare on a website from England. What does London have to say about Shakespeare?

“Because if you just Google ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘England,’ (information from) Stanford is the first thing that pops up. That’s because Google is geographic, and you have to break through that using suffixes and prefixes” in search commands.

November pushed the educators to encourage students to create video tutorials and take advantage of free online courses. He assured teachers their students will rise to challenges. As evidence, he told of a friend, the sole Spanish-language teacher at a small Texas high school, who enrolled his students in an online class in Spanish language and culture.

Students the teacher had for two, three, four years worked harder. Asked why they were flourishing, they told the teacher, “We know what you want for an A. What (the online instructor) wanted, we didn’t know, so we had to do everything for her,” November said.

Also, the students could see the work of thousands of other kids taking the online class. They’d thought they were good students but realized there were much better out there.

Using the online course also freed November’s friend up from a “stand and deliver” teaching style to helping kids learn in small groups and one-on-one.

Another educator friend assigned a different student each day to be class scribe, taking the “official” notes on what was taught. Other students still took their own notes, but as the year went on, they had the shared official notes for reference. The teacher noted that having “ownership” of the official record had students taking better notes.

“Every kid contributing to every kid – I like that,” November said. “Otherwise, you’re fighting for your own grade, making no contribution to the class, showing no sense of responsibility to others.”

A wealth of free resources are on the internet, November showed. An extremely popular introductory computer science course offered at Harvard and Yale, CS50 by David Malan, will be offered free online this year to “any student in the United States, with all the assessments built in,” November said. “So if you’re a high school or middle principal, you could make the announcement this year that any student interested in coding, who wants to design apps and games – that’s a lot of kids, and they may not all have the discipline, but you will have some – they can take this course for no cost.”

November also played clips from brief, student-made tutorials, produced simply and shared worldwide. He called up one video that had 88,000 views and counting. “It’s not 88,000 kids watching it,” he noted. “They hit the rewind button. Lots of kids will watch the video 10 times” to fully understand the material being taught, while they’d be embarrassed to ask a teacher 10 times.

Following the morning’s session, Modesto High School science teacher Brian Heese said, “My first impression was, ‘Oh, my gosh, there’s no way I’m going to learn all this, and it’s going fast.’ But ... using technology to get kids to help other kids is a great idea. I really love that idea and will try to implement that. I’m still concerned about, for me, the time to learn that (technology) to feel comfortable teaching it to them.”

November’s presentation is timely, said Havens, who provides teachers at Davis – in its third year as an all-digital school – with support in online instruction. “This year will be a pilot year for all the other high schools, so they have various classes trying it out now. That’s why it’s such a big emphasis now, because next year, we’re planning to go full (digital) implementation districtwide.”

This story was originally published August 3, 2016 at 4:49 PM with the headline "Consultant gives crash course on cyberspace as teaching tool."