Medfield Teachers’ Day of Digital Learning‒ A Student’s Perspective

Stretching from a night filled with ten glorious hours of dreams, vegging on a comfy couch, roaming the Natick Collection with a multitude of friends; all are activities students at Medfield High School indulge in when granted an unexpected free day.

Medfield students rejoiced about the break from the daily humdrum of tests and drills on the chilly day of February 1.

For some members of the National Honor Society, it was a day off unlike any other, namely, a unique opportunity for students to switch the roles of teacher and student, ingrained into their minds since the days of plastic lunchboxes and sandboxes.

Volunteering their time at the district-wide Medfield Teacher Professional Day, students provided technological support during the technology centered classes for educators from Memorial School to Medfield High School at the Medfield Teachers’ Day of Digital Learning.  

Faculty enthusiastically attended classes ranging in topics from Excel spreadsheets and Glogsters to SMART Boards, Twitter, and Pinterest.  As the staff became aware of how to use the technology at their fingertips, students joined in the experience by sharing laughs and helpful hints.

Eleventh grader Ida Xu writes of her experiences:

Watching teachers learn was a surreal experience for me. They were joking around like “normal” people and exposing a side to me that I had never seen before. Furthermore, they were the ones asking me questions.

The three sessions that I aided were on Excel, Word and Pinterest. All of the teachers were clearly interested in the session they had signed up for. They were eager to learn and happy to discover the wonders of technology that would aid them. It surprised me a little when I found out that I knew more about Excel and Word than my teachers!

While I wandered around the room, teachers would ask my assistance for adding and averaging on Excel, or in session two, making a dotted line in Word. All of the teachers I talked to were excited to integrate their newfound knowledge into the classroom by adding borders to worksheets, writing equations with the equation editor, using Excel for averaging grades or finding ideas on Pinterest.

While watching the teachers surf Pinterest, I was suddenly worried as a student and teenager. What if teachers, adults, started to encroach on “our” world? Would our paths ever cross? And if they did, what would happen?

After thinking it over and talking with a couple of teachers, I discovered that I had nothing to worry about. Students use websites like Pinterest for recreational purposes, while teachers would use the site for finding new ideas to use in the classroom. Furthermore, teenagers would probably migrate to a new “cool” site if they found teachers on Pinterest or other similar websites.

In my opinion, the sessions on technology were very helpful for the teachers, and I hope to see them utilize technology more to help us and them.  

Eleventh grader Christopher Chen writes:

The most interesting course I teacher-aided on was one called “Flipping the Classroom,” taught by Mrs. Tevis-Finn and Mrs. Lohan. The course introduced the concept of taking what students typically do at home and what they do in the classroom and “flipping” them, using “vodcasts,” or video podcasts, on a website called Screencast-O-Matic to record “classroom” lectures for students to watch at home.

This fresh approach to teaching involves more preparatory work for teachers, but comes with several benefits: students usually have no more than fifteen minutes of homework per night, which involves watching and taking notes on concise lecture vodcasts; they have the night to mentally process the information in the vodcasts; class-time can be more engaging for individual students-- and so much more.

In addition to planned theoretical benefits, Mrs. Lohan and Mrs. Tevis-Finn also found some unanticipated advantages to this new way of teaching. For instance, auditory and visual learners found the vodcasts helpful to initially learn the information; others found vodcasts particularly helpful as a central midterm-review resource.

Also, the more engaging classroom environment provides students with a healthy incentive to complete their homework, as the application-based classroom activities demand that they build up fundamental knowledge outside the classroom first.

After attending the “Flipping the Classroom” presentation I noticed that the classroom was flipped on another level; the teachers were the students! In between classes, I was amazed by how closely they resembled high school students in their behavior.

They separated into small groups, talking, joking, discussing weekend plans... If I had closed my eyes I would have sworn I was in the hallway on a normal school day. Even the teacher presenters became suddenly student-like to me when seventh grade math teacher Mrs. Gumas said, “I feel relieved now that [my presentation]’s over,” expressing a feeling of post-class presentation relief all too familiar to students.

My role in helping teachers solve their technical difficulties was equally surreal. I am usually the one asking for clarification and/or help from teachers in their areas of expertise, but suddenly I found the positions reversed as I helped teachers upload files, coordinate animations, and create links.

The reversal was empowering in addition to disorienting, as it made me realize how the technological skills of high school students like myself could be proficient enough to educate our teachers.

Overall, February 1 was a day of eye-opening experiences for both the students and teachers involved.

The roles reversed and students discovered that teaching can simultaneously be exciting and rewarding. Teachers joked that they make the worst students, but when they actually entered their classrooms, they epitomized receptibility and attentiveness.

For teachers, cutting-edge technology gradually transformed from a frightening area of mystery to an innovative and interactive learning tool.  Overall, Medfield Teacher’s Day of Digital Learning was a resounding success!