TeacherScribe

How I'd love to run classes with blogs and podcasting. I don't think you can ever really get away with face to face, one on one contact. But so much time is wasted in schools. Just think, and I'm as guilty of this as anyone, if you blow off the last ten minutes of class and let students visit, in a semester, that amounts to 15 hours of wasted class time. Now couple that with the same amount of time at the beginning of the hour that it takes many of us to get our lessons set and take roll and so on and you're looking at 30 hours of wasted time!

How much more effective would it be if we could, as congressmen George Miller put it, "make school a process rather than just a place."

Colleges are doing it. On the latest podcast from NPR's "All Things Considered," which focuses on education related issues, one university instructor is flipping the traditional classroom model upside down. Instead of expecting student to arrive as blank slates where they will be told what to know in class and then be expected to go out and read about it and enhance what they learned in the class and then be evaluated the next class session on what they learned, this professor is doing the opposite. He has his students come in to class - thanks to blogs and podcasts - full of knowledge already. Then in class they discuss and debate and make meaning out of the knowledge. Of course, while this is going on, he can survey the class and evaluate where students are in terms of leaning.

I like that approach, and this news story goes hand in hand with that approach.

In fact, the more we can put students in charge of their own learning - and allow them to personally relate to it so they can derive significant meaning and relevancy for it - I'm all for it.

In an odd way, I'm working to make my job obsolete. If I'm really teaching kids to learn, I'm really hoping to make them efficient enough where they won't need me. They will be active knowledge seekers.

Yet, where will you find a high-stakes test that can measure that?