Thinking Allowed.

It’s been a while since my last post.

What can I tell you? It’s been busy.

There always seems to be this guilt that hangs over me when I don’t post for extended periods of time. Like I am letting down subscribers…luckily I don’t have too many (thank you, those of you who are here!).

But not having posted does not mean that I haven’t been involved and getting stuck in. (I also post tech how-to’s on another blog, Talking Tech.)

I truly enjoyed a geek session with colleagues, listening to the Warlick keynote from the K12 Online Conference. We, like many, were active in the live chat which was very rewarding.

Even got a little mention on the 2 cents blog, which was pretty cool. Though, appropriately, it was for something a student said to me, rather than any epiphany I’ve offered.

Figures.

In that same chat online I shared a cool NYTimes opinion piece on Facebook from the students’ perspective. Paraphrasing:

We adults take this networking thing too seriously…it’s all supposed to be fun with our friends.

Definitely a good read.

Then working at home last week, I was twittering at the right time to catch Chris Lehmann’s invite to join his class at SLA in a UStream conversation - a terrific experience that Chris posted about. His students are articulate and offered the best description of the difference between a project assessment vs a test.

Paraphrasing:

Tests are what the teachers thinks you’ve learned based on what they covered, but a project is based on what you need to learn.

(Only more eloquent than that.)

The point was well-made. Students own the learning they do in authentic, open-ended projects. For tests they do what they need to, in order to get a good grade.

And all of this got me thinking…

I worry about getting too far removed from the classroom as an Ed Tech guy or as an administrator. Away from the classroom, we lose touch with the wisdom of our students - the insights into how they see the world and the openings for us to be their educators.

We concern ourselves with the big goals and forget the small goals. We don’t have, often enough, the conversations that allow students to connect with us and us with them. The conversations that show how much we value them and their thoughts.

I think that ALL educators in and out of the classroom need to remember and embrace that they are more than “content delivery devices” or even information facilitators. There is a human connection that must be made with students.

Years ago, I heard or read that so much of teen difficulties come from the fact that they are undervalued in society. In pre-Industrial Revolution days, they were working the farm, contributing to the family. Valued. But now, they have little to nothing to make them feel “of worth”. This was a main argument for Service Learning in schools and I am all for that.

I also think that educators have the power to make students feel valued and worthwhile EVERY DAY. In the way we treat them, the way we listen to them, and the way we ask them what they think.

Chris did this with the students on UStream for us, but I imagine he and the SLA faculty do this all the time with their students. When asked what they valued about being at SLA, these students did not speak of the technology or the technological prowess of their faculty. They spoke of the connectedness and self-worth they felt with their teachers, who genuinely cared about their learning and their well-being.

I can’t say it any better than that.

Technorati Tags: k12online07 warlick practicaltheory education ustream

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.

But that’s another post.

(originally posted on harterlearning on Feb 1, 2007)

2 Cents Worth » Take it away! Take it All Away!:

Then someone asked if the literacy skills that I was talking about were part of anyone’s curriculum. The answer is, “Yes!” My own state, for one, has been teaching and testing computer skills for more than ten years. However, it is a reductionist response to the need for digital literacy (what I call contemporary literacy). We have reduced computer skills out into their own list of standards, separated again into objectives, and performance indicators. We’ve reduced it down to components that can be discretely measured.

In this post David Warlick talks about the typical standards document that all tech people have been involved in creating: the skills document that says when kids will have to learn computer skills like how to use a mouse and later spreadsheets and presentations. And we are all careful to avoid saying “Microsoft” or “Excel” or “PowerPoint” because we are concerned with the skill, not the software itself, but then in the end, our document hold us only to teaching that particular software.

This is a document we’ve all worked on … and we’ve all watched it die.

These documents either intimidate the teachers who are supposed to integrate it into their teaching, or it hides on a shelf in a curriculum office, ready for an accreditation.

But here’ s a thought: what if technology was treated as the tool we think it is?

What if our “document” instead required that we focus our attention on thinking skills and 21st century learning - the very ideas that we all seem to celebrate in these blogs?

Let’s take the skills out of that document for a second and focus instead on Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s Essential Questions, from Understanding by Design. By planning student learning using “Backwards Design” (how much longer do we have to call the correct way, “backwards”), we can focus instead on what are the fundamentals of what we believe children need to learn.

School 2.0’s essential questions aren’t about skills. They aren’t about learning spreadsheets or databases or movie making. They are not even about blogging or podcasting or wikis. The essential questions of School 2.0 are about critical thinking and communication and evaluation of resources and information that are everywhere in children’s lives.

If we want the ideas of our blogs to be taken seriously by administrators and curriculum planners, then we must approach our planning the same way that all other educators are expected to. By starting with a focus on those essential questions and those enduring understandings. If that’s the case, then wouldn’t our I.T. document read with questions like, “How do you know something is true?”

Isn’t that greater than just a tech question? Isn’t that a question that stretches from PreK to 12th grade and beyond? And isn’t that a question that all teachers can take ownership of, regardless of their technology skills. We don’t need to take “non-tech” options away from teachers, we need to provide them with a context where tech needs to exist. PreK kids will talk about truth and validity in the context that makes sense to them. So will 4th graders. So will seniors.

So how does technology get into this conversation? The answer: when it fits. Now of course, this requires some amount of articulation by educators who know what they are talking about. Librarians and I.T. coordinators and classroom teachers who do have technology skills. For example, when a discussion of truth includes science and proving a theory with experiments and data, then spreadsheets are introduced to demonstrate techniques of data analysis. Technology is the tool here, not the skill.

We blog all the time that it isn’t about the software skills, that’s it about something greater. But then we all keep making these technology skill standards documents for grade levels and curricula. And I don’t see anyone using them.

Instead of trying to force our stuff on others with our integrated scopes and sequeneces, why don’t we join them? Why don’t we frame great questions about thinking and learning and questioning? And then why don’t we show kids and teachers how technology can help them do all of these things? It is, after all a tool, right?

So now…what are the essential questions of school 2.0?

(originally posted on harterlearning on Jan 9, 2007)

2 Cents Worth » Social Networking Examined:

The principal finding of that study revealed that 55% of online teens use social networks. To some degree, this percentage, though high, seems to contridict society’s notions about teens and their online world.

There is a widespread notion that every American teenager is using social networks, and that they’re plastering personal information over their profiles for anyone and everyone to read,” says Amanda Lenhart. “These findings add nuance to that story – not every teenager is using a social networking website, and of those that do, more than half of them have in some way restricted access to their profile.”(55% of online teens)

Findings of the study indicate that 66% of social networking teens have their profiles blocked from view by anyone but their friends.

So should we be scared? Maybe the numbers are not as bad as media makes them out to be. Warlick goes on to ask the more profound question though: “what should we be doing to embrace that 55% number?” After all what other activity do you know of that 55% of the population do? Not sports, not painting, not chess. His point is a good one…55% may be less than we thought, but 55% is a lot more than anything else.

How do we make it meaningful and educational? Can social networking be used as a learning environment? We are hoping to answer that with the creation of an e-learning community at our school in which teachers and students will interact with their students on course matter. Not that revolutionary, but at the same time we want to provide RSS and other features that allow for some customizability and some pursuit of personal interests - without turning it into a MySpace clutterfest (though our visually-literate students don’t seem to mind).