digital native - Judy Imamudeen

Creating A Community of Mindful Learners

By Judy Imamudeen | November 13, 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Sometimes you teach what you know well, and sometimes you teach what you want to know better. Mindfulness is definitely a skill that is under development and I am learning right along with the students. As a digital immigrant, my life has transitioned from simple face-to-face interactions and long conversations on the telephone to pop-up notifications and the buzzing dings that demand my attention. For me, mindfulness is not about meditation, it is about awareness; of inhabiting my body and my mind in a healthy and mature way. As I think about the precious learners in our class, I think about their futures and how they might handle stress and relationships in this digital age that is ever evolving at such a rapid pace, a pace that makes it difficult to manage at times. That is why I wholeheartedly agree that mindfulness is not something you teach kids to “calm them down” but to teach them how to do as part of their daily habits, which I think of as mental hygiene.

Because I feel so strongly that this is a life skill, I have been more consistent in cultivating a practice in our classroom. It all started as experimentation and a curiosity into a line of inquiry (how we learn best) when we began our Who We Are unit, but then, due to the illness and fluctuation in our teaching team, the routine seemed important and necessary to send “well wishes” to people struggling with health issues. I feel quite fortunate because, at my school, I am not seen as the “kooky hippie”, but a fellow practitioner of mindfulness and receive support in teaching lessons. Members of our counseling team come to class 2 times a week to provide support lessons based on the work of the Mindful Schools program.And what I find most interesting was, in our recent student surveys, students put learning about their brain (which is something that I do as a component of the practice) as one of their favorite activities. So clearly, they are curious about how the mind works and want to develop this awareness of themselves and others. In our recent One World Day assembly, classes were invited to present ideas related to the United Nations’ Global Goals. We reflected on the goal of health and well-being and I interviewed a few of our students about mindfulness and who are the people they have compassion for, which I refer to as “well wishes”. It was a supremely sweet and telling moment when I did this, as I learned a lot about what my students value and care about. You can see the video here in this post.

We also demonstrated a bit of our practice with the audience, as the ringing of the brass bell signaled a moment to breathe and reflect on who or what we want to send well-wishes to. Then we took turns sharing our well-wishes.

One thing that is both wonderful and terrible about mindfulness is that it is never “learned”. You can’t have book knowledge about this topic. It is a practice, a skill, a habit which is ongoing and evolving. I do believe that the residual effects of this practice may not be seen immediately, but I feel hopeful that this intention to have a culture of mindfulness will have a lasting impact. Becoming more mindful, creating space between thoughts, developing focus and awareness, and cultivating compassion for others and oneself is, I believe, something that all our students, young or old, can benefit from and need in order to cope with the transitions and challenges that their future holds.

Perhaps you too have been curious about implementing this sort of habit into your classroom. I strongly encourage you! And if others would like to share their experience in the comments below, I welcome your ideas and suggestions.

May you be happy.

May you be peaceful.

May you be safe.

May you be healthy.

May you be love.

And my students love to throw in…

May you be smart.

Judy Imamudeen

Developing learners as leaders is my joy! I am committed and passionate International Baccaluearate (IB) educator who loves cracking jokes, jumping on trampolines and reading books. When I’m not playing Minecraft with my daughter, I work on empowering others in order to create a future that works for everyone.

judyimamudeen.com

My Flawed Thinking: Confessions of A Digital Immigrant

By Judy Imamudeen | September 24, 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Perhaps you haven’t considered lately how far we’ve come in the journey with computers in the classroom. I recently was watching an interview with Hal Abelson about the history of Logo, the first computer programming language that was taught to kids. In it, he shares the philosophy of Logo and the determination that the father of constructionism, Seymour Papert, had in bringing computers into the classroom:

Well, one thing I learned from Seymour Papert is that he used to talk about developing technology with a low floor and a high ceiling, meaning it’s easy to get started, the low floor, and you can do more and more sophisticated things over time, a high ceiling. We sometimes also talk about having wide walls, meaning you can have many different pathways. It’s not enough just to have everyone doing the same thing and doing more complex things, but people doing different types of things.

I know Hal is talking about computer programming, but that is only one aspect of how we use computers and devices in our learning environments. It is fascinating to think about what an impact these pioneers have had in creating a generation of “digital natives”. Once a computer was a huge expensive noisy machine, but now it ubiquitous. Our young learners have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computer video games, digital MP3 players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other tools of the digital age. As an enthusiastic educator, it’s hard not be inspired by where technology has taken us and where it will take us in our students’ learning. I am always searching for how we might cultivate deeper thinking and creativity in our use of iPads in the learning to demonstrate this “high ceiling”. However, I recently discovered that I have some preconceived notions about my digital natives. The cartoon really summarizes my error in thinking and that I need to appreciate that, although technology can provide this low ceiling, I have to still lead them into the “learning environment”–even if I am a Digital Immigrant.

During this last week of learning, we have been working through the transdisciplinary theme, How We Organize Ourselves, inquiring into the central idea: Community Spaces provide people with opportunities to connect. We have developed “expert” groups for different community spaces at our school and it came up that we may need some signs to help us know about the appropriate behavior in different areas. So we considered how technology can help us to augment or extend the learning by this project and decided to use Adobe Spark Post to explore how we might create the visual message. However, I noticed that the students are accustomed to using iPads just for consumption purposes instead of using them for creativity or collaboration. Before we can shift into higher levels of purposeful use in the classroom, they need to get into habits of taken active roles as learners of technology. They required a lot of handholding to start the project and I began to think how I might have given them more support in orientating to the app before beginning. Even though it wasn’t a total flop, I wanted a lesson “do-over” so that students could make better connections and be empowered. With this in mind, I recognized my faulty logic in assuming that because they are digital natives, they are naturally orientated to using apps. I started to think about what my next steps need to be and how might I approach it differently.

After reflecting, I see these as the basic concepts and ideas that they need further development in:

Learn….

What do different icons mean?
How to problem solve when they can’t spell a word?

Understand….

How their projects are seen and can be shared on the device (co-use and collaborate).
How that double tapping is an editing command.
That changes made on a project happen in real time.
A design can be improved upon and their current model or idea is just one iteration.

In hindsight, these outcomes seem like a natural starting point and should have been obvious in the lesson design; but as a digital immigrant, I think they implicitly know how to get started with technology. I assumed that so much of their experience has exposed them to these things and thought that the app could teach itself. My design checklist and quick demonstration of the app was simply not enough to draw out the nuances that students needed to develop when creating a product. If I want them to go into higher levels of their learning and creativity, I have to remember that, although I am not a digital native, I am their teacher and I need to make sure they have a clear picture of the power of the tool before them. There’s a careful balance of making sure that students are finding problems that they can solve, and that they have the skills to use technology to solve these problems.

I am sure my confession resonates with many educators, as they think back to a lesson that should have gone better than it did. But sometimes you do the teaching and sometimes you do the learning. (: