4 ways to deal with 'Content Explosion'

From when I was young, I remember a conversation between my Dad and my Uncle Keith. Uncle Keith worked for the navy in a job which involved the use of computers in their early form. Dad was pointing out how easy these computers must make it for Keith to do his job these days, and in response Keith just sighed and shook his head sadly,

"Naaaa, not really, all that happens now is that I'm given even more to do, and expected to do it better and faster."

This is the crux of my 'content explosion theory'. In my day at school, producing a project of some sort would require quite a bit of handwriting, drawing, colouring, cutting and sticking. All this is time consuming to a left-handed ponderous worker like myself. The resulting masterpiece would be handed in and marked by my long suffering teachers. This process was likely to take a couple of days, a week or even longer. Therefore the balance of work produced to work returned marked, was relatively easy to maintain for my teachers.

Spring forward to my internet, iPad and 1 to 1 enabled classroom and it doesn't quite work like that anymore. Were I to let them, my students could produce one of those type of projects every day, 'internet' researched. Including professional looking graphics and a decent amount of design awareness.

Similarly my students can produce extended pieces of writing, shoot and edit films, create an Explain Everything to er... explain something and more. This volume of material just keeps coming forth, mounting up like European wheat waiting to be consumed by an overnourished and time-poor populace. Pearson refer to the ‘Digital Ocean’ in regards to data on students, but this is also a mass of content that is growing daily, not just data, and it is all out there.

This became a real problem in the early days of the 1 to 1 roll out in my class. The students were on a creation frenzy, encouraged by me to choose their own method of demonstrating their learning, they began creating piles and gigabytes of 'stuff'. Stuff that there was never any chance that I was going to have enough waking hours to consume, mark and feedback on. I caught myself contemplating what I could do to 'slow them down' but soon realised this was not the kind of place I wanted to be in. Slowing down students who were desperate to create was the antithesis of what I was after.

So I came up with a few techniques I have begged, borrowed and stolen from wherever I could to turn this opportunity into a much deeper and more powerful learning experience. These are things that good learning and teaching has always needed, but become particularly relevant in the creative 1 to 1 environment:

mountpleasantgranary.net

1. Focus heavily on the audience.

For each piece of learning where my students will be creating something to demonstrate their understanding, I give them an audience. Peers from elsewhere in the world or younger/older children from my own school have worked well. Parents and other adult audiences can be used effectively too. This focuses the students on how their work will appeal to the chosen audience, and consider the needs of that audience when assembling their pieces. For example, my Y5 maths group created iBooks to teach Y2 children all about shapes. They also designed a lesson, with activities, to teach Y3 students about how to stay safe when using the internet. Getting them to teach the lesson was a huge learning experience.

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2. Focus on the process.

How are they going to achieve what they need to? What do they need to know? How can they present what they know? Which methods will be most effective? As they are working, how can they check that their approach is working? A colleague and I are developing a template proforma with guiding questions to facilitate these kind of questioning activities and to develop a process based approach to learning tasks.

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3. Focus on the quality of the end product.

Now there are better tools for the job, the job needs to be completed to a higher standard. This will generally still be reflected in the amount of time students spend on creative projects. If it is quick and easy to do, has it been done well enough? For example, authoring an iBook is a task that can be done very quickly, but usually a much better end product will result from taking time to draft and redraft the text, create the artwork and carefully design the layout for maximum effect. During this process is where you as a teacher can use timely feedback/advice to guide and influence the learners towards improvement. If you want to know more about assessing learning at a deeper level, check out some great thinking here, at Mindshift.

4. Do something 'real' with it.

Although I am probably more interested in the process the students have gone through, than the end product. It is still something that needs to be valued. Follow through with the audience anyway you can think of. Skype, exhibitions, sharing times, blogs, film shows, exit point events, teaching a lesson and publishing a book are just some of the ways. Remember, a truly good audience will be able to give some kind of feedback, and enable the students to reflect on how successful they were this time.

Is everything I do with my students set up like this? No, it's not. But I do connect the other learning tasks we do to the overall end products, so students can see the reasons for each task, and how it leads into their wider learning.

Creating An 'Audience - Motivation' Loop.

http://sites.middlebury.edu/thekeystodanbrownsinferno/chapter-45/

Seven years old and shivering, I sat in the cloakroom outside Mrs Cope’s classroom. I’d been sent here for the dastardly crime of not writing enough. In half an hour I’d managed two sentences about a picture that bored me. I now awaited my punishment of being ‘seen’ by the head teacher, Mr Ella. Now I don’t hold any grudge towards Mrs Cope, she was just dealing with a reluctant writer in the way she knew how. But her methods sure didn’t make me want to improve as a writer. Looking back, I wonder, why didn’t I want to write and what could Mrs Cope have actually done to motivate me as a writer?

Jump to today, and perhaps you’ll be pleased to know that I have survived my early days as an unenthusiastic writer to present you with my blog. And you are currently reading it. Which I appreciate greatly, so thank you. But really what am I expecting from this undertaking? What is the purpose here, who is the audience and how am I serving them?

These are exactly the questions I ensure my students can answer before setting them off to plan or complete their writing.

Todays Authors

Little Johnny busts his guts writing his story. He even goes back and checks it against the success criteria we have agreed in class, making changes, choosing some more powerful verbs, more engaging vocabulary and even fixing some punctuation mistakes. But what now? Maybe we’ll have time for the class to peer assess each other’s work. I will read it of course and perhaps his parents will flick through it on consultation day. But what is the point of writing it with almost no one to read it?

Now I am aware that intrinsic motivation has been proven as the most effective motivation for self improvement, however it would take an incredibly motivated and self aware 10 year old (boy?) to write just for the purpose of improving writing. Many adults would struggle to manage that. So there has to be another reason for writing. ‘Because the teacher said so’ is not going to be enough in most young authors’ minds.

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So writing for an audience does motivate students to produce their best writing, let’s agree on that. But where does this audience come from, how do we get the texts to the audience and how can we be sure they have even read it?

Today, teachers have many more tools at their disposal for generating an audience for their student’s work. Most of these are due to technology. Pioneers such as @deputymitchell are busy spreading the word for developing an audience for students’ writing using blogs. In fact, he works especially hard to develop a ‘Global’ audience for young writers. It’s a great idea, and I believe it is very effective.

Audience from?

But here is the crux of the developing problem. If everyone is writing for this audience, who is actually going to be the audience? Of course the same people as are writing you say. But does this actually happen? Everyone is motivated by the reaction they get for their writing, but are they giving a reaction to other people? Everytime they post something, are they reciprocating by reading and reacting to another writers post? I’m not convinced that this is actually happening. But it needs to, otherwise everybody will be so busy creating that nobody will have time to be the audience.

Unchecked, I think this could lead to ‘capitalist literature’. A sort of 'Top of the Pops' where only those exceptional pieces create any real audience for themselves and the vast majority of work goes unnoticed. Is this a positive message for our emerging writers? Do we really want to be making our students compete for an audience? I guess that is a personal choice. But for me, everybody deserves a chance to have their achievements recognised, even if they are small achievements in comparison to others’.

Top of the Pops chart, BBC TV 1960s,
The Lowry, Salford exhibition August 2013

I think of the tools at Mrs Cope’s disposal. I guess she could have been more enthusiastic about my attempts, more positive in praising my efforts, and maybe she could have taken some of my work and displayed it. That could have helped. This last method was the only real method she had of widening the audience for my work. And even back then it was recognised as something worthwhile doing.

I have set myself the target of writing a blog post every three weeks. In that time I think I read about 15 or so other blog posts. So, all things being equal, I think I should receive around 15 views per post. Currently I get more, but I’d still be perfectly happy with that. However, one piece of writing per student every three weeks is not going to cut it as enough writing ‘volume’ for students to improve their skills sufficiently.

Possible Approaches?

• Be very selective with what is blogged, only the very best finished piece is allowed. Everything leading to this piece is working towards that final goal.
• Sign up for @duputymitchell’s ‘Quadblogging’ where classes around the world are matched to read and comment on each other’s blogs. Highly recommended, I’ve had great experiences using this.
• Use Lend Me Your Literacy to share your student’s work.
• Put work up on the wall, particularly in shared areas.

Most importantly, be an audience for other writers and encourage your students to do the same.