Oh-oh! The downside of doing an interview is living up to it! (Down to it?) I was contacted by Harris Salat over at Visual Thesaurus a few months back. He interviewed me over the phone and here’s the finished product.
Category Archives: Student Access
We Should Cut Back On Technology In Schools?
Wes Fryer has posted a podcast of a presentation – “Encouraging Reading†by Stephen Krashen, Professor Emeritus University of Southern California, at Encyclo-Media 2006, Oklahoma City, OK_01 September 2006 (Thanks Wes!). It is a great presentation and I highly recommend it. I practically cheered through most of it. The gist is we need to return to doing “Silent Sustained Reading†with our students and put more books into our libraries, classrooms, homes and hands of “At Risk†students. I wholeheartedly agree. SSR has been one of the unintended victims of the time constraints imposed by the requirements of NCLB in many classrooms – it was not forbidden, but at least discouraged at my school over the last 5 – 6 years.
Interestingly, towards the end of his presentation Krashen concludes, among other things, that we should cut back on technology in schools and put the money into books (he says he can’t find any data that supports technology improving reading ability).
I’m sure I’m not the only one that sees a hole in the logic here. I know Dean Shareski for one is questioning the reasoning (note his comment on Wes’s post). My short version response is:
Using technology in education is not mainly about supporting reading instruction (although whether supported by research or not, I suspect technology at least provides greater access and motivation to read) – technology is a tool used to support the gathering, organizing, editing, sharing, presenting, archiving, discussing and collaborating about information (feel free to add to the list, I left out plenty). Technology in its many forms is a tool like paper, pencils, books and libraries are tools (and resources) used to help gather, process and disseminate knowledge. Technology has become so pervasive and valuable a tool, and has so many applications, that being at least basically literate in its use has become an essential learning. An essential learning that presently is only available to the middle and upper classes for the most part outside of schools and libraries. Technology use in schools is not just about using it as a tool, but also using it ethically – which again is tough if it is not available at your home under the supervision of family members that understand its use and implications. (kind of like drug, sex and health education)
Could you lead a successful and fulfilling life without technology … yes. You could say the same about learning to drive a car or using transportation – you don’t have to know how to drive or use modern transportation – how many do so successfully in today’s world?
I could be wrong, but the last time I looked the internet seemed to have at least some pages that contained text, at least some of which might be material that one could access and read … during say … Silent Sustained Reading time? I think I noticed it covers many different topics and languages too – and I have had students participate in online discussions (that they had to read and respond to) a few with authors of books or poetry – so I bet at least some students would find some interesting material on the net (and some software) to read.
Is there research to support my point? I’m not sure I care. I do suspect we should put money into books and technology – and just education in general.
Learning is messy.
A Small – But I Hope Significant Breakthrough
What Happened To The Time?
I haven’t managed to post in a couple of weeks – getting ready for the school year, planning and presenting about the Activboards we received and the digital cameras we bought for each classroom in our school are reasons, but actually I’ve written numerous comments on other’s blogs and have started to write several posts only to not finish – mainly from lack of time (and sleep). I suspect with the school year started my writing will increase.
In the short time I have been blogging (6 – 7 months) I’ve done my share of ranting about the lack of engagement the vast majority of teachers have with using the newest tools of teaching and learning. Well I’m here to report a bit of a breakthrough with my own co-workers. Through a grant each teacher at my school received a new digital camera. I teamed with another teacher to teach the basic use of the camera, but more importantly the how, when, where and why to use it. We had them download the photo software onto their own classroom computers, take a few pictures and successfully download them, and then showed examples of how we and others have used digital photography to support learning and had them do part of a project.
We have been in school for 3 days and although I have been using my Activboard fairly extensively I have not done anything with my camera yet – but others on my staff have embraced it. A first grade class has already made 3 class books (in three days!!!) illustrated with photos they have taken – one book shows the tour of the school they took the first day with photos of the clinic and nurse and aide so that students will remember who and where they are and similar pages of the office and staff, the library, etc. Other classes have taken photos of each class member to use in various “get-to-know-you†activities and so on. It seems everybody but me has done at least something with their new camera. And guess what? – they’re excited and enthusiastic and ready for more. I hope this signifies a breakthrough! I noticed some of our new laptops arrived today and we have Elmos and various other pieces on the way.
Now if the batteries for my class’s 7 year old laptops would just get ordered (waiting for a disbursement from another grant in late September) I’ll get my 1:1 laptop program going in my classroom including a class blog if things go well – maybe this is why I’m so busy?
Learning Is Messy!
Parents Shaky About Digital Kids Safety
Interesting article on CNET in light of the recent discussions about DOPA – Parents shaky about kids’ safety online By Stefanie Olsen. One telling quote from the article:
Despite a need to shoulder the responsibility, teachers seem bereft of the materials and time needed to teach kids about online media literacy. According to Levin, 60 percent of teachers said that information and media literacy skills aren’t taught enough in schools. And 78 percent of teachers said that they’ve had to learn about media literacy skills on their own in order to educate kids.
But my favorite paragraph is this one:
Those strategies include setting rules about what kids are allowed to do online, Levin said. Next, use parental control technology available from ISPs or search engines. And third, don’t panic. Kids will eventually run into something online that they shouldn’t. Talking to children about it is the best approach, Levin said.
What a concept! Really a pretty good take on the situation – a worthwhile read!
It’s Not About the Tech
One of my first experiences with tech being thought of as the end all, be all, happened about 20 years ago. I was teaching 6th grade at a very high-income public school in California. Being a new teacher at the school the other teachers were explaining to me how careful I was going to have to be with grading – especially on the report cards. “If you are going to give a kid an A- or B+ you have to be ready to pull out your gradebook and a calculator in front of the parents and do the math right in front of them to prove that the grade is correct,†they warned me. They went on to explain that this would not happen very often, but it would happen.
Sure enough – when the first set of report cards came out I was sitting in a parent/teacher conference and one student’s parents had me show them why their son got an A- in math – with the gradebook and a calculator (them peering over my shoulder). Two other teachers were sitting with us and the parents asked one of them about the B+ their son had received from her in reading. She was using a gradebook program on her Apple IIe computer and pulled out the print out to show the parents. That was it … “You did the grades on a computer?… then never-mind … they must be accurate.†They left without so much as a glance at the printout. They were gone about 30 seconds when we all burst out laughing … because we knew that in reality the way this program worked the chances of making a mistake was much higher with the computer! But this happened 2 or 3 other times that same year.
I also had 3 Apple IIe’s in my classroom – and to integrate them I had students take turns in teams of 3 to run “Where in the World Is Carmen San Diego?†I had more parents come to visit my classroom (even parents that didn’t have kids in my classroom) to observe kids using the program and pulling out assorted reference books to look up the clues to find Carmen. I did this during “silent reading time†as a way to include reference books into the mix. Pretty cool – for 20 minutes or so a day. I had student’s moms come speak to me on several occaisions after school (twice in tears), so happy that their child was going to be far ahead of other kids their age because they were using a computer in class!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I bring this up in reference to a post from Chris Lehmann at Practical Theory about how his school is going to open as a 1:1 laptop school – every student will have an Apple G4 iBook. Chris explains:
“We are going to be modelling the “textbookless school” in that we did not order textbooks for every kid. We’ll have classroom sets of books to use as references, but the laptops will be the primary learning tool at SLA.”
And:
“We really have the opportunity to create School 2.0, and we can’t wait to try.”
But here is the important part. Chris is wary of the tech being an end all, be all:
“The laptops aren’t what change schools all by the themselves, the way we think about schools — the way we plan, the way we teach, the way we assess, the way we talk about what our schools can and should be — all those things are more important than the tools.â€
Yesterday I posted about Best Practices and one of my points was that very often teachers that use best practices with technology just figure that that’s the way everyone does it so they don’t get the word out about what they are doing that is so powerful (I called it WOW! kind of stuff – see point 8) Well here is another area that has made people wary of tech integration. Maybe it’s just me, but so often when I’ve observed teachers that have obtained tech for their classroom, they wait for the tech to take over and make their program fly. Well it ain’t gonna happen! But they and their administrators and their students and their parents become disillusioned about tech and project-based learning (which also is often done poorly and so gets its own round of bad PR) and that makes it harder to find those really, really, really great examples and make the case for 21st century tools.
Pencils, paper, books, markers, rulers – are all just tools that allow access to learning. Giving students these tools doesn’t make them learners – it is teaching students about how to use them effectively – and your chances of being successful in life is fairly bleak without the knowledge of using these and other tools – that is the point.
So congrats to Chris and his staff on going into their adventure with their eyes wide open about how to use these new tools. And best wishes to Theodore Lehmann – all of 10 days or so (and family) on upcoming surgery. Thank God medical schools have understood the value of hands-on/minds-on learning for quite awhile.
Learning is messy!
Where are the “Best Practices” Examples!??!
One of the most popular posts (judging by the number of comments it received) on this young blog (6 months old) was Working, Breathing, Reproducible, Intriguing Models – where I lamented the seeming lack of good models of project/problem based learning supported by tech and web 2.0 applications. I wondered where they were and why they weren’t being marketed ad naseum on every edtech blog out there.
Recently Will Richardson posted asking Where are the Best Practices? He cites Tom Marsh:
It brings me back to NECC where during a Webcast I was a part of Tom Marsh asked this very question: Where are all the really, really, really great examples?
There are some pretty important conversations going on, and teachers, as much as (if not more than) anyone else, should be engaged in these conversations. Blogging, wikis, and other new web applications seem ready-made for these conversations — but what do teachers talk about in your teacher’s lounge?
I don’t think there are that many “Best Practice” examples out there on the web for the following reasons:
1 – Many school districts tend to block access to posting student work and/or the online applications to do so. (Like you never heard that one before.)
2 – The finish work involved in sharing something publicly is often the hardest most time consuming part so it doesn’t get done, especially in the “testing everything†age.
3 – Some don’t feel that the finished product is important, only the journey there is (I disagree) so they have no publishable finished product to share (THE POWER OF THESE TOOLS IS SHARING IT – MAKING IT A RESOURCE FOR OTHERS!!!!) But I digress.
4 – The sharing part can also be the most technically demanding part and the costliest. It costs me little to nothing to make a video with my students but what if I don’t have a web site to share it on? Or I’m not familiar with FTPing? Or my district forbids or even kind of frowns on sharing student work and I don’t feel empowered to buck that and become marginalized – which is a big step for teachers that don’t get paid much money or respect and have their standing as a professional as one of the few things to hold onto – that’s tough to jeopardize for many.
5 – At the middle and high school level teachers tend to have students for an hour or less at a time, so doing lots of web 2.0 stuff and getting it to a polished, publishable state is tough – and publishing “works-in-progress†isn’t always appreciated by administration and some parents until they’ve been enlightened about the process.
6 – At elementary school level you are often starting kids from scratch (because no one else is doing this) and just getting them going on one application takes time (and how is that prepping them for the ITBS?????) and time-wise teachers often have to choose between doing tech/web 2.0 or doing a project (with maybe some tech support) and all the time being questioned about the educational value of what they are doing – how many are really going to deal with that and buck the system?
7 – Unfortunately some are more interested in being able to say they are doing the most cutting edge stuff and spend time always doing the newest thing as opposed to really utilizing one or several tools really effectively with their students so edtech and project based learning come up looking weak.
8 – Many just don’t realize what they have done is “Best Practice” WOW! kind of stuff, or they don’t see the value in publishing, or they are too modest. “You mean publish that!? Isn’t everybody doing stuff like this?”
The answer is NOOOOO!
I have found though that if you get one good, solid product out there it creates a buzz – and suddenly you are the expert (true or not) and gain a certain level of trust. Just like a movie director that makes one hit movie suddenly is a genius and is given more encouragement and support to carry on with other projects. Don’t try to do everything! Do one thing really well (or maybe more than one thing depending) and be able to showcase it and its effectiveness as a learning situation and tool. From my experience, if what your students produce is quality, and the process along the way led to real learning, you will be “allowed†to do more. Then get what your students have produced published on the web whether it’s a blog, or video, or wiki, or a web page … you get the idea … so it can be part of a showcase of the “Best Practices†so many are looking for.
Maybe we can even get the edbloggers with the highest readership (and everyone else too) to each make a roll of “Best Practice†or “Model†or whatever examples of edtech that is easy for even a novice tech person to find and use to navigate those examples. Some of the Wikis posted to do this are great, but mainly to those that already “get it.†Let’s have multiple portals to these examples – and a links section in the right hand column (TOP) of everyones blog might be a good place to start. But first we need the examples.
Who decides which examples are worthy – and how do we find the examples that might already be out there????
Learning is messy!
Active Learning With ACTIVboards
I spent 3 days last week being trained, along with about 20 other elementary teachers in my school district, in using a Promethean ACTIVboard. My classroom was picked to be the model classroom for this pilot so an ACTIVboard and ceiling mounted projector were installed. Way cool stuff.
The best part of the training was the teachers that attended. They are all getting ACTIVboards installed in their classrooms and they each got a new laptop (HP). Most of the teachers were at least fairly comfortable with tech, but a few were not. Never-the-less they all had a can-do attitude and when anyone was stumped – are you ready – they asked questions and found out how to do it. They were excited and enthusiastic and it rubbed off on me. The trainers spent the most time on having teachers make “Flip-Charts” which are basically like doing a Powerpoint presentation with a few twists – you can even bring Powerpoint files into the Flipchart software and run it there which many liked.
Making the Flipcharts also required teachers to learn to obtain and use images and other files from multiple sources (clipart, internet, photos, scanned images and text) and other skills like using a scanner, digital camera, various software pieces, which most participants were not familiar with or had little experience in using in a presentation format.
The idea here is to include the students in the interactive presentations by having them come to the board to interact with text, sound, video, etc. which is a great concept (and even design their own Flipcharts). My one reservation was that no time was spent really discussing doing things differently, not just adding the technology and then pretty much doing things exactly the same as before … but baby steps. We will be meeting once a month to discuss and share and there is talk of setting up an online bulletin board or some other way to stay in contact between meetings and share content and lessons and since only 2 or 3 of us even knew what that was it will introduce more teachers to the possibilities of conversation using tech, which can’t be bad.
Reprised Because of DOPA – So As Parents and Educators We Monitor and Teach Ethical, Appropriate, Safe Use
I am reprising this post since the vote about Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) is happening soon. See David Warlick’s blog to get contact info to contact representatives about their vote.
Paper and pencils can be used to draw inappropriate, hate filled, pictures messages and ideas – and you could poke someone’s eye out. They could even be used to lure your child into a dangerous situation. Should we (and could we if we tried?) cut off access to keep our children safe? No, because they are everywhere and too valuable in so many ways, so as parents and educators we monitor and teach ethical, appropriate, safe use.
Over 200,000 children are injured using playground equipment each year, some are killed. Should we (and could we if we tried?) cut access to playground equipment to keep our children safe? No, because they’re eventually going to find play equipment and playing is too valuable an experience, so as parents and educators we monitor and teach ethical, appropriate, safe use.
50,000 people die or are injured in swimming accidents each year. Should we (and could we if we tried?) cut access to swimming to keep our children safe? No, because pools and lakes and ponds are everywhere and it would be dangerous if they fell in and it is too valuable and healthy a skill, so as parents and educators we monitor and teach ethical, appropriate, safe use.
30,000 people are killed and thousands more injured in auto crashes each year. Should we (and could we if we tried?) cut access to cars and driving to keep our children safe? No, cars are everywhere and driving is too valuable, so as parents and educators we monitor and teach ethical, appropriate, safe use.
Phones are used for criminal activities, even luring kids away from home. Should we (and could we if we tried?) cut off access to phones to keep our children safe? No, phones are everywhere and they are too valuable, so as parents and educators we monitor and teach ethical, appropriate, safe use.
There are some churches and religions out there that don’t have the same beliefs as yours – and some even preach ideas that you would consider blasphemous and hateful. Should we (and could we if we tried?) cut off access to religion to keep our children safe? No, religion is everywhere and it is too valuable, so as parents and educators we monitor and teach ethical, appropriate, safe use.
There are applications of technology that can expose your child to inappropriate, hate filled, pictures, messages and ideas. Technology and the internet are everywhere. Do we cut off access? (and could we if we tried?) Or are these applications too educationally valuable? As parents and educators it would be better if we monitored and taught ethical, appropriate, safe use.
Otherwise who will teach them about these things and where will they learn about them?
Learning is messy!
These Guys Get It!
Will Richardson posted today about his experience at SLA this week – it ties in with David Warlick’s post from yesterday about what he heard about teachers in China teaching less and planning more. From Will’s blog:
It was the last day of an 8-day intensive planning session, and they were probably more tuned into the “closing ceremonies†to be held at a neighborhood restaurant in the afternoon than on listening to me, but I was extremely impressed by their attention, their questions and their thinking. And their thinking was all over the place…on a Moodle site where they have been capturing all of their work, on newsprint post-its all over the walls of the planning room, in their conversation. I sat there just envious as all get out that Chris had this opportunity to really build “School 2.0,†and I said as much to all of them.
Did you catch that? An 8 day planning session!? Were the teachers paid for their time? What a concept! And they still have six weeks before school starts to digest the conversation and continue to plan. Doesn’t that cost more money? We can’t be spending more on education, we already get more than we need – we just need to spend it more wisely – less administration and cheaper toilet paper and paper towels (please note this is sarcasm on my part in case you missed it).
Is Chris Lehmann planning to provide planning days during the school year too? That would almost make me consider teaching secondary school and moving to Philadelphia! I can’t wait to see what Dave finds out about the planning time in China! These guys are doing it right. I’ve been asking where the great examples of whole schools doing project/problem-based learning supported by tech integration are … it sounds like this is really one to watch … but no pressure Chris!  ; )
The Choice Isn’t Do We Want To Spend The Money – It’s What Do We Spend It On?
Interesting story on MSNBC by Martin Savidge tonight called: “Violent Crime Rates On The Rise Nationwide.” The gist of the story is:
“The latest preliminary FBI statistics show murders in the U.S. jumped 4.8 percent last year while overall violent crime was up 2.5 percent.
And in many communities the upsurge is attributed to juveniles.”
It goes on to explain that Homeland Security is stripping monies from HOMETOWN security. Mainly law enforcement and youth programs.
Experts say the solution is to return to what worked in the 1990s when crime rates plummeted.
“We need to go back to the hard work of crime control, cops and crime prevention, youth programs,” Menino says. “They work, but it takes time and money.”
As one law enforcement analyst put it, “Either we pay for programs now or pay for victims later.”
I’ve said for years that: The Choice Isn’t Whether To Spend The Money. It’s Whether You Want To Spend It On Education And Youth Programs Or On Crime and Unemployment.
UPDATE/AFTERTHOUGHT – I meant to note here that this also speaks volumes to making school more meaningful and engaging for more students. It doesn’t seem that 6 years of testing, testing, testing has accomplished that – or did I miss something?
Learning Is Messy!