EdTech Conferences… sigh
conferences, integration, pedagogy, powerful ideas, teaching Tagged Change, conference, teaching, Tools November 24th, 2008Well, it’s day two of the NYSCATE conference and I am just a little jaded. We KNOW that it is how teachers teach that makes learning meaningful and engaging for students, not the tools that they use. However, so much of the discussion about these things is about the tools. Granted, folks come to these things in large part just for that reason. But Here are some of the comments I have overheard while sitting down quietly eating lunch from Subway (not paying the $45 to sit at a table in the banquet hall).
- “I just heard the greatest idea… have kids write haikus in PowerPoint!”
- “Did you know that we shouldn’t use serif fonts in our presentations… we should use “sans-serif” (teacher struggling with the pronunciation here)”. Colleague asks, “Why?” Response: “I think it’s harder to read?… and did you know, using Comic Sans is illegal?”
-”I went to two of the Troxell presentations yesterday trying to win a document camera.” (Troxell and other vendor-driven sessions rob attendees of potential professional knowledge they could gain from sessions that actually might make a difference).
Then, to top it off, Marc Prensky’s keynote… sigh. Here it is in a nutshell:
-YouTube rules the world.
-Let kids make “YouTubes” and the world will be a better place.
-All you need to do is use digital tools and wisdom will abound.
-Digital tools somehow make age old, good teaching pedagogy built on the shoulders of giants like Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner, Papert… somehow new and sexy.
-I am a digital immigrant… a 21st century retard.
-He invites up a panel of “digital natives”, of which only two are in high school and one is 38 with children of her own. Then he asks the hundred million dollar question: “How many of you have cell phones and how many of you use Facebook?” Gary Stager tweets out that his 92 year old grandmother has one and so what?
Granted, he did make some good points, but by and large, I wanted to stand up and scream. Perhaps I should have. I could have competed with his obnoxious beeps that he had strategically placed in his linear 197 slide presentation to keep the audience awake.
After that keynote, I tried to find a presentation that was not solely about cool tools or cool stuff. I tried one, then another. A third sounded hopeful, but the presentation was dreadful. If you’re going to talk about assessment, you’d better be relevant and engaging - that’s all I have to say about that. Thankfully, I ended up in Sylvia Martinez’s session on GenYes. And thankfully, she set Prensky straight on his failure to realize that good has always been good teaching - teaching engages and creates valuable and relevant learning opportunity, not the tools. The tools help… that good teaching is not easy and that it requires more than YouTube and cellphones. Gary Stager talks a great deal about using computers for powerful ideas, but I don’t hear much about powerful ideas
Anyway, I’m really not trying to complain… although I guess that I am. Oh, how I am wishing for sessions that couch new tools within teaching excellence. How I wish I could sense an atmosphere of hungering to improve one’s own teaching craft. Oh, to overhear conversations about how new ideas on more effective teaching have been gleaned rather than which font should be used or isn’t ________ (you fill in the blank) so cool. We all need help… but not help in how to create stunning. gimmicky Powerpoints, flashy podcasts, “interactive” white board lessons, fancy document camera acrobatics, cool videos, clicker quizzes, … We (myself included here) need help on teaching our students in powerful ways and learning how to relinquish some of the control in order to empower them as learners, creators, communicators, problem-solvers, collaborators, meaning-makers,… students who make a difference and who feel empowered.
What if… what if we did away altogether with technology professional development/training and focused solely on effective and meaningful pedagogies while embedding in those pedagogies the necessary tools both teachers and students can use to make learning meaningful, relevant, and powerful?
The day ended with some good conversation in a session with Peter Riley and other leaders in their own right… conversation that needs to continue as we all struggle with how to best negotiate this new digital landscape and continue (or perhaps begin?) to meet the needs of students. I’m hoping that I will find more of these little nuggets - these types of conversations that I missed when the podcasts are available.
My fear is that these conferences do as much (if not more) to preserve the status quo as they do challenge it.
Am I off base here?
November 26th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
I agree with you in so many ways here. Teaching moves so far beyond tools and engagement and networking. Good teachers know that tools must be used purposefully, and they help students make choices that enable them to achieve far greater goals. It’s about research. It’s about critical thinking. This is not multiple choice. It’s a performance-based assessment.
We have leaders who understand how to use data in truly meaningful ways. We have leaders who are able to build rich, engaging curricula. We have leaders who understand assessment as a process and how to build tests that are powerful products. We have leaders who understand tools and leaders who understand that the web and learning is about so much more than that.
The challenge lies in the fact that most of us lead in only a handful of these ways, and our kids need us to lead in all of them.
How do we get there? What kind of leader do we need to get that done?
November 28th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Stephen,
Very glad to take the time to read your blog post about NYSCATE. I attended your session first and then noticed you in several of the subsequent sessions that I chose. I wondered what you were thinking. Our discussion on that last Peter Riley session needed to go on for about two hours more. And I totally agree, too many sales pitches masquerading as sessions–that’s what I go to the vendor floor for, where I can keep walking. I didn’t even consider attending any of those marketing moments.
And to Angela-we need leaders from the ranks to keep moving up to positions of power where we can get it done one district at a time by leaders who aren’t afraid to take a stand.
December 14th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Amen to everything.
I think there is a niche for a blogger who will focus on pushing inquiry in the classroom and use 2.0 tools to do it, not pushing to use 2.0 tools because they automatically lead to inquiry. Hmmm…that made more sense in my head…basically a blog based on your “What if…” sentence.
December 15th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Paul, I think that’s where we really need to focus our efforts… on transitioning from talking about big ideas to making them happen. Leadership is so important in the equation - an equation that is quite complex indeed.
December 15th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
I agree with you. In my class I have a unit labeled “Critical Analysis in a Digital Age” that I work with students in their engagement with technology. We do everything from iChat challenges to finding search engines that work for them. I try to make the use of technology personal for them, with an emphasis on “thinking” before they do anything.
December 16th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Jamey, that’s great that your emphasis is on thinking/process rather than the technology. Why don’t we do that more with teachers as part of professional development?