Meeting and Encouraging Teacher Learners Where They Are (Or, Hands off the Mouse!)

When you work with adult learners, especially adult learners who are teachers, it’s easy to forget that even though they are adults, they are also our students. And like any student, we have to meet them where they are and encourage them to move forward in their learning without frustrating them, judging them, making them feel guilty, or enabling them.


Having been comfortable with technology from the start of my career, I admit to having been frustrated at times when I observe teachers who have been around for a while but who have embraced technology on only the most basic, required level. These are the teachers who learn the online gradebook or learned how to use their email because the school required them to do it. Without those skills, they would not be able to function in their jobs. So they make an effort to become minimally functional, but they stop there.

I have realized in the past year or so, though, that I am partly to blame for the people who stagnate at a very basic technology skill level, because as their support person I have done things FOR them for so many years. There is often a time crunch when assistance is needed and it is usually faster to just do something for them instead of WITH them. But I have enabled them to stay at their basic levels by opting for the faster solution.

To become a better teacher of teachers, I'm learning (and it's HARD) to keep my hands behind my back and away from the keyboard and mouse even with the most basic (and sometimes slow) computer users.

This past year I helped several folks in a workshop copy a URL from their web browser into a spreadsheet so they could revisit good lesson plans they found online. (Yes, I know Delicious would have been a better solution, but these folks were not ready for that yet.) I talked the participants through the process instead of doing it for them. They thought it was the coolest thing in the world. For them it was, and that's ok, even though many of us in the edtech world would say that was just a basic skill. Hopefully those folks have acquired this basic skill and will be able to accomplish the task again on their own.

Recently, I was fortunate to receive first-hand testimony that my “no hands on the mouse if at all possible” rule is paying off. Within the last month during a workshop on digital storytelling using Microsoft PhotoStory, we had a couple of teachers who obviously were not super-comfortable with all of the computer skills it took to put a story together. My co-facilitator and I coached them through it. We coached A LOT! Toward the end of the day, one of them looked at me and said something to the effect of, “Thank you for all of your help today and your patience. And thank you for not taking the mouse from me. I learn so much more when I get to control the computer myself.” I wondered how many times impatient (but well intentioned) people had accomplished technology tasks for this teacher. And I felt myself grinning from ear-to-ear, because this teacher was excited about what he had learned, I was excited that my “hands-off” philosophy was working, and as an added bonus, the PhotoStory they turned out was well done and had all of us in stitches at the end of the day.

I'm also learning in more informal circumstances when calls for help come to make appointments with people if at all possible and teach them how to do the task they are struggling with. Talk them through it no matter how basic or complicated the skill. When they see they are capable, they often start to try more on their own. Or at least their questions change from "Can you do this for me?" to "Can you show me how to do this?"

And, yes, all of these folks are amazed when they learn what we more savvy users of tech think of as basic skills. But that’s where they are. Where I am, I’m amazed when I edit audio or video (and it works) or figure out what’s wrong with a web page that isn’t displaying properly. No matter what our baseline is, there is great power in amazement and wonder. Amazement and wonder are closely linked to curiosity, which is the doorway to learning. They create opportunities to for us to say, "You think this is amazing? You want to know what's even more amazing? You can learn to do this. Take the mouse. Let me show you how."


Image Source: http://mrg.bz/yqG8ia (used with permission)

More on Copyright and Fair Use

Wes Fryer just wrote a great post on Copyright and Licensing Considerations When Importing Audio Books. It's a perfect extension on the information in my post of June 23rd regarding fair use and copyright.

In the scenario from my June 23rd post, the main concern was the fact that the audio recordings of the books would be posted to the web. When you get right down to it, recording a book or ripping a recording of one, even for personal use, breaks copyright law even if it's never reposted anywhere or shared with anyone else. I decided not to go into that when I wrote my post, but Wes does a great job of going into those details in his blog post. He even touches on recording content from out-of-date technologies such as VHS or cassete tapes to digital formats for continued use. I encourage you to read it and share your thoughts!

Just Because It's Educational Doesn't Mean It's Fair Use

I think many educators with good intentions use techniques like the one I'm about to describe below to support their students' learning without ever even thinking about the possibility that they might be infringing on someone's copyright.

In the course I am currently taking, one of the topics that has been addressed on the discussion boards is podcasting and its various uses in education. One of the teachers in the class posted how excited she was about using podcasting in the coming school year to record the books her students read. She plans to post the recordings to her website so the children can access them from home. She felt that since she wasn't using the recording from her school's library, she felt she had no issues with copyright.

I'm not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV or the web for that matter, but recording an entire piece of literature and posting out to the web for anyone to get to seemed like a copyright violation to me. Even if the purpose was educational and not-for-profit.

Here are the comments I posted in the class discussion:

I think it is admirable that you want to provide audio recordings of the books your students will be reading in class, but I think you might need to research the copyright implications a little more closely. I'm not a lawyer, but I try to keep up with the fundamentals of this since I have to help educate our teachers on copyright.

Unless the books are so old that they are in the Public Domain, recording them word-for-word and posting them on the Internet could be a violation of copyright. Most books have this paragraph or one like it on the copyright page inside the cover:

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other - except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.


Authors and publishers receive royalties off of the recorded versions of their books. Recording a book yourself and posting it to the Internet where anyone can download it can negatively impact the earning power of the book, which is one of the big litmus tests of copyright violation when copyright cases are brought to court. In reality, recording a book and posting it online is no different than photcopying or word-processing the whole book and then posting it on the web where anyone can download it without having to pay the author and publisher.

If any of the titles you are reading are older and out of copyright, you might find them in iTunes. One of the neatest resources I have heard about recently is Lit2Go, a joint project of the University of South Florida and the Florida Educational Technology Clearinghouse: http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/. I hope this link is helpful to you.

My guess is recording and posting a short passage from a work of literature or a single poem from an anthology would be considered fair use, but the entire work posted out to the Internet where anyone can download it almost certainly crosses the fair use line.

There was a time when I thought posting such materials on a password protected web site or within a learning managment system such as Moodle or Blackboard would keep the content in the Fair Use realm, but this article regarding UCLA telling professors to stop posting videos to their online courses made me realize that the password protection practice may not cover educators either.

As educators we all need to keep abreast of what is permissable, especially in a Web 2.0 world. We should demonstrate respect for the intellectual property of others and model that respect in front of our students. The Stanford University Libraries have a wonderful resource website on Copyright and Fair Use which includes a continuously updated blog with updates on curent cases if you would like to investigate further. Because copyright is also an interest of mine, I am always adding to my copyright bookmarks on Delicious, where as of this post I have 42 bookmarks on copyright, some of which include lessons for students.

What do you do to help fellow educators and students understand the concepts of copyright and fair use? Please share your own copyright resources or stories in the comments.

Update 6-27-10 - I posted a short follow-up to the above post. Click to read More on Copyright and Fair Use.

Update 7-9-10 - Copyright has been on my radar lately! For a couple of real-life illustrations which might help educate teachers and students on the importance of copyright protections, see my post Current Real-Life Examples for Discussing Copyright Ethics.