Drupal Schools Network

This may be obvious, but I'll say it anyway.

I just looked through the "Special Report" of the January issue of eSchoolNews, and even though I am a proponent of technology integration, I felt disgust at the industrial pandering and begged questions. Example:

"Kids have to power down as they walk into a school. They have to turn off the technology they use and go back to a traditional lecture environment. No wonder kids are bored and disengaged....  Yet it is difficult to get educators and school leaders to tackle the problem, because of the existing school system infrastructure."

Of course, students like to choose the things they attend to and participate in! When was that not true?

Unless the school has become a prison, every classroom teacher has the chance to create an environment where students will "buy in" and act as if their participation was a choice rather than a compulsion.

It's true that you can bribe students with computers to make that choice.  Who wouldn't prefer to be in a computer lab than a lecture hall, all other things equal?

But eSchool News promotes the reliance upon technology to cure the problem of student disengagement, as if the lack of technology caused the problem.  It is painful to imagine teachers and administrators so uncritical as to read along head-nodding, but no doubt people do.

Good teachers establish relationships with their classes that result in "suspension of resistance."   They are able to negotiate a social contract with their classes as social groups, so when they say "we," students hear "us," not  "you".  

What does this have to do with Drupal?

The social networking environment of Drupal empowers students and teachers to interact more freely than in the classroom.  Shy students may lead online discussions, though they might never be caught walking to the front of a classroom and holding forth for 10 minutes.

This empowerment only makes sense in the hands of a teacher who has assumed and been granted social leadership by her students, it seems to me.

When such a teacher asks her students to go home to post and comment online,  they are likely to do so with personal intent, and thus contribute to shared meaning and enthusiasm online and later in the classroom.

What else would sustain the willingness of teenagers to give more attention to school assignments than to 15 IM buddies messaging them?

-Bram