Learning & Leading Through Technology

munication between teacher and student that is of paramount importance to a successful digital age classroom.

Websites, social media, and mobile learning devices pave the way to the narrative feedback that drives mastery learning in the ROLE.

What’s truly exciting about this kind of evaluation is students’ willingness to improve their learning when they receive immediate, meaningful feedback on the digital tools they use.

When a student reviews narrative feedback directly where her work product is housed, it’s easy to navigate to a prior lesson and instantly make the teacher’s suggested changes. I often link video instruction, online presentations, bookmarked Diigo sites, and other content to comments I leave on a student’s digital work. Then he can open this link to instruction, review or reread it, and apply it back to the project without ever leaving his device.

In our amazing social networking world, I am automatically alerted via email or digital notification to any changes a student makes to a document or project. The power and immediacy of this kind of learning is undeniable. Students know that they can make quick changes to activities and projects, and they want to do this, because it’s convenient and takes place in their world. Put a 50/100 score on a student’s written work, and see how eager she is to return to prior learning and resubmit the activity.

The ROLE Creates Curators of Info

When I started teaching language arts
more than two decades ago, a student
portfolio represented a collection of
work placed in a folder, which was
ultimately put in a box in a storage
room. If used as intended, the portfo-
lio served as a vehicle for reflection on
individual learning and growth over
the course of an entire school year.

Occasionally, these portfolios were shared with parents, but this was the extent of their usefulness. Maybe a handful of people saw each student’s curated works. Most became nothing more than dust collectors that would eventually be discarded.

In 2006, when it became available worldwide, Facebook changed everything related to sharing information. Soon Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and a myriad of other social media created a cascade effect on how information is shared. Although education is seemingly light-years behind the rest of the world when it comes to online social networking and sharing, students in the ROLE are joining the public as the new curators of information. Recognizing the need to teach students how to efficiently curate what they find and what they create is fast becoming educators’ greatest responsibility.

The internet is rife with digital libraries now being stocked by people of all ages and experiences. You don’t have to be a professional writer anymore to publish your work. Free publishing sites, such as FastPencil, Kindle Direct Publishing, Storybird, and Figment, supply an outlet for a young writer’s poetry, prose, scientific essays, song lyrics, or personal narratives. More important, these places give students a voice that pencil and paper can’t provide.

Social networks create collaboration
that can infuse thought-provoking
dialogue into the classroom that many
students would not otherwise partici-
pate in. This discussion can be main-
tained directly on that social network
or on a wiki page or message board for
others to view. A classroom blog of-
fers a place where students can express
themselves in continuing conversa-
tions while allowing peers in their
school or from around the world to
read their work. These social networks
are creating curators of information,
and educators must teach students just
what this means, as they are becoming
some of our most important content
providers and managers. Today’s stu-
dents are curating literature and infor-
mation that we will use, perhaps, for
centuries to come.

This is the nature of the digital-age, student-centered ROLE. It is a place that emphasizes mastery learning through the use of any effective digital web tool or mobile learning device available. The ROLE is home to a new kind of teacher, who understands when it’s time to get out of the way to create a collaborative, often chaotic, workshop setting, where students ask and answer most of the questions. It’s a place that is founded on narrative feedback that is housed in the digital tools each student uses.

This is a classroom, regardless of subject or grade, where students are independent learners eager to share their insights and skills. The ROLE is a place that builds lifelong learners because it is collaborative, digital, comfortable, and engaging. Best of all, in the student-centered, results-only classroom, learning is fun.

Mark Barnes is a veteran teacher and author of Role Reversal: Achieving Uncommonly Excellent Results in the Student-Centered Classroom and The Five-Minute Teacher, both published by ASCD.

Barnes created the video website www.learnitin5. com. He blogs regularly at ResultsOnlyLearning. com. Find him on Twitter @markbarnes19.

The cornerstone of the ROLE is the use of remarkably powerful narrative feedback. Web tools provide a virtual environment for this two-way communication between teacher and student that is of paramount importance to a successful digital age classroom.