I have just come out of the room after presenting the I.T. Curriculum 2.0 presentation that Justin and I developed a year ago and its newest iteration. Was a great turn out and a wonderful conversation. People offered terrific insight and questions and it is an awesome reminder how smart the people running schools are. And it’s an honor to start a conversation with them about rethinking how students learn and what they need to learn.
(Click on the Presentations tab to get to my wiki to see notes and resources from the presentation.)
What’s additionally cooler though, is having a colleague like Jeff who live blogged my whole session to his audience and created a back channel conversation on all of those thoughts. Thanks Jeff. Check out the unbelievable conversation that happened online, live as I was presenting. Talk about shared learning!
Next presentation on Tuesday, 13:45 my time which I believe is GMT +8. Looking for Learning – How supervsiors can foster best practice technology use. The more I’ve been talking with administrators, the more I see that this is something a lot of schools want to know more about. I’m excited.
Ian Shapira from The Washington Post has written an article this week describing how many young teachers in Washington DC have Facebook accounts that are publicly accessible and are filled with content that represents them in inappropriate ways. Essentially, they are being young adults, but in a way that they don’t realize is in the public domain.
It’s almost like Googling someone: Log on to Facebook. Join the Washington, D.C., network. Search the Web site for your favorite school system. And then watch the public profiles of 20-something teachers unfurl like gift wrap on the screen, revealing a sense of humor that can be overtly sarcastic or unintentionally unprofessional — or both.
The article goes on to ask whether teachers should be judged on their out-of-school lives if it doesn’t affect their effectiveness with students:
Do the risque pages matter if teacher performance is not hindered and if students, parents and school officials don’t see them? At what point are these young teachers judged by the standards for public officials?
In states including Florida, Colorado, Tennessee and Massachusetts, teachers have been removed or suspended for MySpace postings, and some teachers unions have begun warning members about racy personal Web sites. But as Facebook, with 70 million members, and other social networking sites continue to grow, scrutiny will no doubt spread locally.
Whether they “should” or not is a big discussion point, but whether they “will” or not really isn’t.
In today’s society where political correctness reigns and public scrutiny and “moral” standards are held in front of everyone’s face, there is no doubt that Washington DC will follow the other states in removing teachers for social networking behavior.
Do adults need to be re-taught what privacy means since it’s meaning has changed with the coming of the internet?
Do they know how to manage their own Facebook accounts – never mind teach students how to protect theirs?
Like several other teachers interviewed, Webster said she thought her page could be seen only by people she accepted as “friends.” But like those of many teachers on Facebook, Webster’s profile was accessible by the more than 525,000 members of the Washington, D.C., network. Anyone can join any geographic network.
Are young teachers in training ready to defend their Facebook profile in an interview?
“I know for a fact that when a superintendent in Missouri was interviewing potential teachers last year, he would ask, ‘Do you have a Facebook or MySpace page?’ ” said Todd Fuller, a spokesman for the Missouri State Teachers Association, which is warning members to clean up their pages. “If the candidate said yes, then the superintendent would say, ‘I’ve got my computer up right now. Let’s take a look.’ “
Ultimately, the lessons of cyber-safety and responsibility that we teach our students needs to be shared with our teachers too. It should be included in their professional training (along with learning to use web 2.0 tools to enhance education of course).
All students, no matter what future profession they go into, also need to see the importance of knowing what they share and how they share online. And what better way to model this for a teacher than to share the very impact it has on our own lives and how we are perceived through what we and others share online.
Too many believe that the rules of public behavior are abandoned in Facebook. Here’s a terrific video which makes this very clear. Thanks to Brian Lockwood for the link to this on Twitter.
Will Richardson followed up his request for contributions to his wiki page mentioned in my last post with a thank you and an expression of appreciation for the power of people getting together to offer their ideas and share with others. To that, I left the following as a comment and since it is so closely related to my previous post, I thought I’d share it here.
(apologies to those who read it on Weblogg-ed already.)
The power of the collective intelligence that we can tap into with the web continues to amaze me. But even more so now, I am impressed and encouraged by the willingness of people to do so.
People continue to want to better EVERYONE’S knowledge and understanding through sharing, collaborating, and conversation.
I remember someone telling me (though I can’t remember who) that true collaboration is when educators recognize that they are no longer responsible for the education of their students, but rather they are responsible for the education of ALL students.
While easy for me to say in my tech coordinator role – it’s a tough thing to let go of and acknowledge for a lot of educators.
At the school level, that means a teacher letting go of caring only about the experience that their own students get and sharing ideas and resources with colleagues so that all children at the grade level or school benefit.
At an administrative level, that means letting go of representing only your own building or division and working cooperatively with other administrators to ensure that all students in the district or school can best learn.
What I see daily on the web is that very concept applied to its greatest level. We share ideas and resources not only so that our kids at our schools benefit, but so that ALL kids at ALL schools benefit.
We want EDUCATION to improve, and together, we are collaborating and conversing to make that happen.
There has been a lot of conversation over the Vision of Students video by Mike Wesch. Scott McLeod referred us to the “dust up” and Gary Stager and Wesch are having a good talk write about it. I see Stager’s point that the blogsosphere can “inflate” the worth of a piece of work, but I still think that the resulting conversation is powerful.
And not possible without blogs and RSS and our edublogosphere.
Whether the video portrays university education’s flaws or whether it gives us a picture of students’ reality or even if it just shows us that students are “whiners”, what has resulted from the video is a conversation that is awesome.
Students in the classroom are talking to teachers about their lives outside of the classroom.
Teachers are talking to their students about relevancy.
Educators are talking to other educators about how to engage students more.
Parents are wondering what their child is getting for 20,000 dollars a year.
And ultimately, people who believe in and loveeducation are talking about rigor and scholarship and lesson design and LEARNING.
And that ain’t bad.
But in the end, what I wanted to share in this post was a quote from Wesch’s response to Stager and other’s criticism. This is why students (digital native or captive or whatever) still need teachers.
The great myth is that these “digital natives” know more about this new information environment than we do. But here’s the reality: they may be experts in entertaining themselves online, but they know almost nothing about educating themselves online.
What a fabulous quote. That whole paragraph is great. Check it out.
Will Richardson has a much larger readership than I do, so if you find his post through me, something is amiss. I loved what he said at the end of his post on a recent cover story from Business Week on “The Future of Work” which he shares highlights from.
I wonder how many teachers are getting ready for the new school year by developing a deeply collaborative curriculum, one in which they model for their students not just connections with other teacher/learners but co-creation of knowledge, in whatever forms that takes. I wonder how many of them are being supported in that effort. We have the capability to create these types of environments; what we need is to provide more and more opportunities for teachers to connect and learn with other educators and professionals from around the globe.
Amen.
Is anyone someone asking their students to co-create knowledge? Where is the support coming from? When will our curriculum not focus on content knowledge, but rather on the co-creation of new knowledge?
No dice for Second Life. Or at least IN Second Life. Washington Post ran this article saying that they have just made a decision to ban gambling in Second Life.
“Because there are a variety of conflicting gambling regulations around the world we have chosen to restrict gambling in Second Life,” Robin Harper, senior vice president of marketing and business development for Linden Research, which runs Second Life, wrote in a posting to the company’s blog July 25.
The announcement was posted under her virtual persona’s name, Robin Linden.
This was a decision made with sensitivity to cultures around the world for which gambling is taboo (a nice move). Additionally (and more likely the real motivation), they also needed to avoid the fact that it was illegal in many areas, before Congress came a-knocking.
The short article is a funny one though because they throw in some random other facts:
An Australian newspaper published an article this week stating that terrorist groups are training for attacks by practicing in the online world. In Italy, a priest writing in the religious journal La Civilta Cattolica urged missionaries to consider Second Life a new place to save souls.
Now you can’t tell me that’s not a sweet gig for the young, would-be missionary. You’ve been lazing around playing computer games all your life and now instead of heading off to isolated areas, war-torn nations, or impoverished villages to convert…ahhh…just stay in your pajamas, grab a bowl of cereal and go save some souls online.
Maybe you can get some e-mailing done while you’re at it.
So I am late chiming in on the NY Times laptop article. You know the one…the one that says one-to-one laptops are not showing any improvement in learning and schools are ditching their programs left and right. Justin wrote a great post on it over at Medagogy. Chris Lehmann chimed in over at Practical Theory. Warlick put in his 2 pennies. In the Ed Tech blogosphere, this article is everywhere.
Here’s the thing. Almost every complaint/dig/slam of the laptops in students’ hands came from the perspective of the teacher. Laptops “did not fit into lesson plans”… “It’s a distraction” … “The box gets in the way … “They are too hard to manage” …
Where laptops and Internet use make a difference are in innovation, creativity, autonomy and independent research…
[Oh, I get it, and we wouldn't want that? (where is that sarcastic font when I need it?)]
It could be that laptops in students’ hands are useless as the article suggests, but doesn’t that seem counter-intuitive? Doesn’t access to information and opportunities to engage, communicate, and think with students in a way that they use, interact, and enjoy in their own time sound like a good thing? And doesn’t providing students in a school setting with tools that they use regularly,outside of school, seem like a chance opportunity to engage them in discussion about responsible use, being safe, and the implications of their online behavior? I could go on.
Instead, I offer this question: is it not also likely that the teachers are not sure how to use the laptops with the kids in a proactive, educationally sound way?
Could it be that teachers are the very digital immigrants that we talk about as being so different from our digital native kids? And if that’s the case (it is) then isn’t it likely that if scores aren’t supporting improved learning then maybe it isn’t the technology failing, but rather the people entrusted with using them well who aren’t doing the job. (before you lynch me, it isn’t their fault…read on)
Often the most simple, logical answer is the right answer.
News media like to emphasize possibilities that surprise you. It’s not a secret that they like to sensationalize. Even the New York Times. Providing laptops and access to information to kids is a positive move for learning sounds right. It’s why so many people did it. It should be a good thing.
So why isn’t it?
Were we wrong? Maybe, but not likely. Ideas that are so intuitively sound are usually not wrong.
Instead, could it be that WE DID IT WRONG? Probably.
Most teachers are not social networking and blogging and thinking about the needs of 21st century learning. They are Math teachers and English teachers and Grade 2 teachers who were trained to be the kinds of teachers that we had when we were kids. Their ideas of best teaching practice come from a world before laptops in classrooms and probably before Internet access was possible (particularly for schools).
And I’ll be the first to say that good teaching is good teaching. That sharing passion and engaging students in subject matter and learning has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with a teacher.
But that’s not what we are talking about here. We are talking about the teachers for whom the technology was expected to solve less-than-good-teaching (or at least not inspirational teaching). And that wasn’t going to happen. It was unfair to teachers and to the technology to have expected it. (luckily, the technology’s feelings weren’t hurt)
What teachers need with technology is REAL professional development and REAL support. They need technology support people whose job is to make sure that they understand what good laptop classroom management looks like. It isn’t hard to keep kids off of mySpace during class. But if you’ve never had to think about it before, you might not know how to do it. These tech support facilitators need to be 100% devoted to the implementation of technology in their schools. They need to be available to team teach with teachers to model good laptop classroom management strategies and share integration ideas. It is their job to learn new technologies and figure out their implications on learning. Teachers are too busy to keep up with that stuff. (see Kim’s post on always learning)
The shame of it all is that the reaction of schools to abandon laptop programs is hurting the students. Once again, decisions are being made that are “most convenient for us, not best for them.” (Dangerously Irrelevant) Sure, in this case, the decision is couched behind scores that haven’t improved, but the causality is all wrong.
Do it right and it will work. Do it wrong and it won’t.
“A good craftsman never blames his tools.” (thanks, Keith Olbermann and ESPN Sportscenter!)
It’s worth noting that perhaps these schools and districts concede that they will never hire these support people or create a professional environment in which teachers have an opportunity to succeed. If they concede this, then they might as well abandon the laptops.
But if they really want kids to learn WHAT THEY NEED TO LEARN, then the cause of why it didn’t work must be looked at. And then they must bring the laptops back with an infrastructure in place (training, personnel, HELP) so that teachers aren’t pre-destined to fail, but rather are given a real and fair opportunity to succeed.
In the end, if teachers, schools or districts resist or deny this, then it is the students who suffer and who ultimately will not be prepared for their future. Our past is over. We must stop insisting that learning only happens when it matches the testing and models of that past.
Laptops are gateways to information. They can instigate real learning about ethics, communication, safety, responsibility, and high-order thinking. But they need a teacher to do that. A teacher supported and prepared and passionate to do that.
Our curricula of content mired in Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies is not preparing students for anything but further education focused on these same subjects.
What students learn needs to be different and how they learn needs to be different.
Given the realities of our modern age and the demands of our children’s future, is it really okay to allow teachers to choose whether or not they incorporate modern technologies into their instruction?
The comments that followed this particular question from his readers are worth reading.
Here’s the thing…it isn’t about whether technology must be included in children’s educational experience. It’s actually about the THINKING SKILLS that must be included.
There is no doubt that students live in a digital world. That they behave and think and communicate in digital ways. And including technology in their schooling will probably serve to engage them and make their education seem a little more relevant.
But they need more than that.
21st century learners need thinking skills. They need to be able to find, process, and evaluate information that is EVERYWHERE and always accessible. They need to be able to participate in an interconnected, wired world in effective and responsible ways. They NEED to be taught how to manage/handle/thrive amidst all of the information that is out there and continuing to grow.
Our allegiance to English, Science, Math, and Social Studies as core curricular ideals and the end-all-be-all in student learning needs to make room for higher order thinking, questioning, and information literacy.
I am not arguing for the abolishment of those subjects (though a part of me thinks that they continue to drive our curriculum because they suit us the teachers, rather than our intended audience, the students – see another McLeod question on this). I do think, though, that major curricular overhaul is needed and schools need to consider an overarching or interwoven curricular piece that embraces the skills that 21st century learners need.
Going back to the original question then, No, it’s not okay.
To accomplish these thinking skills and to get students to evaluate and understand the world they are in and the world we will be sending them off into, technology needs to be there. Technology is the tool for information access. Technology is the tool for communication of ideas, thoughts, opinion, fact and bias. Technology is the tool from which a massive discussion of ethical behavior continues to emerge. How can we not include technology in children’s education? If we don’t include it, what are they learning?
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