EdTechTrek

The headline reads: “Colleges spend billions to prep freshman.” The by-line: “High school graduates increasingly unprepared for college work, remediation falls most heavily to community colleges” A study is quoted at reporting that as much as one third of American college students have enrolled in remedial classes. Although this is often done at great expense to colleges, I think the sadder story is that it needs to be done at all for such high percentages of college freshmen. But, to shed some light on a different aspect of the problem, I share the following quotation from the article:

Eric Paris, who earned a 3.8 high school GPA but is finding his freshman year at Virginia Tech much more challenging, says the big difference is “it’s all on my own.” In class, “it’s up to me if I want to sit on Facebook or pay attention.” He, too, wishes he’d taken more challenging high school classes but thought a high GPA was more important.

We lead students to believe that grades are everything, that having a high GPA is critical to getting into a good college (and it is, but it’s not the only determiner), so they then take easy courses to boost their GPAs and end up with this false sense of accomplishment that get stripped away when they are told that they must enroll in remedial writing or remedial math their freshman year. I have had students like this. You wonder how the system has failed them. Actually, I have had graduate students who have never had to write a real research paper. I have had elementary education majors who wanted to teach high school, but could not complete the requisite math courses. They figured since they were not all that good at math that they could at least teach younger students. I want to strangle them at this point of the conversation.

You know, we have a number of highly complex problems that continue to plague American education. This should not be one of them. We desperately need strong math and science teachers at the elementary level. I, myself, am a recovering math disaster, largely due to many of my elementary teachers who did not have a clue as to how to really teach mathematical concepts. Sure, they could teach the rules of regrouping or the definitions of polygons, but all that takes is reading a few statements out of the teacher’s manual. That didn’t meet my needs. Today, I have a much healthier and sound conceptual mathematical understanding and am so thankful for some of my education professors who taught methods of teaching math and remedial math methods. I now reteach my own son when he comes home from school, not understanding the most basic of concepts.

I avoided the hard courses to keep my grades up in high school. I hope that my children do not. I hope that they are both empowered and challenged by their teachers. I hope that their teachers will see areas of need and address those needs ASAP. I hope their teachers will teach to their strenghts and strenthen those areas of weakness. I hope their teachers will value their interests and make learning relevant. I hope that their teachers use all resources and tools at their disposal. I hope that their teachers will fight for resources and tools that they do not have access to and desperately need. I hope that their teachers believe in them.

That’s a lot of hoping, isn’t it.

Should so much at stake be resting in the arms of hope?

(Disclaimer: This post is not meant to be critical of the democratic party nominee per se… only critical of empty rhetoric)

There have been a number of critics (here, here, here) who have critiqued the commonly used term, “21st century skills” to represent a new skillset that students and workers must possess in this global and highly digital society and economy.

But from this article, it is pretty clear that Obama does not have a clue what 21st century skills really entails. In ths Eschoolnews article, he is quoted as saying (my thoughts in red):

“Without a workforce trained in math, science and technology, and the other skills of the 21st century (so now math and science are skills of the 21st century?), our companies will innovate less, our economy will grow less, and our nation will be less competitive. If we want to out-compete the world tomorrow, we must out-educate (test?) the world today,” Obama said. He added: “While technology has transformed just about every aspect of our lives–from the way we travel, to the way we communicate, to the way we look after our health–one of the places where we’ve failed to seize its full potential is in the classroom. (This is quite true. I have no problem with this statement.)

“Imagine a future where our children are more motivated because they aren’t just learning on blackboards, but on new whiteboards with digital touch screens (So, simply replacing chalkboards…(they aren’t all black these days, senator) with digital whiteboards will revolutionize education. Huh.); where every student in a classroom has a laptop at [his or her] desk; where [students] don’t just do book reports but design PowerPoint presentations (Great! Let’s spend all of that money on technology infrastructure, software, and hardware so students can do PowerPoint book report presentations from their laptops. There’s innovation for you!) ; where they don’t just write papers, but they build web sites (with text copied and pasted from the Internet and from textbooks?); where research isn’t done just by taking a book out of the library, but by eMailing experts in the field (Okay…that’s actually a great idea.); and where teachers are less a source of knowledge than a coach for how best to use it and obtain knowledge(Again, a great idea, but not new in the 21st century either.). By fostering innovation (But what’s the innovation in all of this?), we can help make sure every school in America is a school of the future.

“And that’s what we’re going to do when I’m president. We will help schools integrate technology into their curriculum, so we can make sure public school students are fluent in the digital language of the 21st-century economy. We’ll teach our students not only math and science, but teamwork and critical thinking and communication skills (I hate to be a party pooper here, but these are not new in the 21st century.), because that’s how we’ll make sure they’re prepared for today’s workplace.”

So, what are we left with here? A plug for digital whiteboards, laptops, authoring websites, PowerPoint ad nauseum, and a little constructivist philosophy thrown in the mix. Oh yes, math and science is important. This is not the stuff that great speeches are made of. This is not the rhetoric of an informed politician. And the biggest slap is the subheading to the article: “GOP largely silent on 21st-century skills”. I guess they need to throw some of these terms around as well to make us all happy. Well, I certainly am not happy about what I read. I hope you are not, either. We have been struggling with these learning issues for decades now. Throwing technology into the mix is not the silver bullet. We know that. And funny, but there is no mention of any (with the exception of math and science and the hint of technology-based standardized testing) of this on his webpage regarding educational policy.

So, Mr. Obama (you should read through this), what really needs to happen to see teaching and learning innovation in our nation’s schools? Unless you have that figured out, all of the money you allocate to your “plan for change” will just be more of the same. At least we can use a digital white board to project PowerPoint presentations, right?

I came across an article that discussed Internet safety for students and it briefly touched upon different ways students find to get around our “safety” mechanisms. This one in particular caught my eye and struck me as being quite insidious. Hidemyass.com states:

.. An anonymous free proxy service aimed at hiding your online identity. Use our service to hide your IP address and bypass your work/school web filter with ease. For example, is MySpace blocked at work/school? It won’t be any longer if you use our free service

It also provides a link to 28 more such services.

The Internet has certainly brought so much value and power to the individual learner. I just wonder if there is any documentation out there that would let us know the percentage of students who are using such services to LEARN vs. those who are using them to access inappropriate content and services. MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites are commonly blocked at many schools and are frequently destinations for students multiple times throughout the day. I would not put those in the inappropriate category, but they can certainly be a distraction when time is supposed to be put on learning activities rather than social ones. Yes, students can and should be networking as part of their learning, but I doubt that this is the majority of social networking use for teens.

But, what if teachers structured things so that students needed to network virtually in order to complete learning assignments and projects? Many teachers are doing just that. This would require that social networking services not be filtered while at school. The solution - many districts now host and manage their own such services in-house. But somehow this still takes control and responsibility away from teachers and students and keeps the power in the hands of the administrators who play “god” with permissions, settings, accounts,… something many of us resent as we are used to controlling our own learning and networking when not at school. When we take such control away from students, to the benefits (safety)  outweigh the drawbacks? If so, from whose perspective? Teachers? Parents? Administrators? IT personnel? Students? Or, are we fooling ourselves with such protection mechanisms, as students who want to can easily get around them. For every new proxy service that gets discovered and added to school filter rules, new ones emerge. Is it a game worth playing? Is it a game that must be played? Kids are kids, after all.

Internet-facilitated networking and learning sure makes things more messy and potentially problematic. If anyone out there knows of some documentation that reports on the types of interactions students are embarking on while using these proxy services to get around school-based filters, I’d love to hear about it.

After almost a  month of busy scheduling with family, I am finally back and ready to resume my professional endeavors (reading, writing, teaching, …). Vacation time is great, but exhausting at times as well. Being away from Internet was also great, but the glut of “important” information that I missed or have to catch up on is quite daunting. Is all of that information really “critical” or are we filling  more and more of our time with the consumption of information that does not really impact our day-to-day lives, perspectives, and beliefs? Ask yourself if all that you are now in the habit of consuming is paying off or just occupying more of your time. I need to ask myself this as well.

I revisited an old tool today - Wordle. I had forgotten about it and wanted to give it a whirl. Wordle creates word clouds from a variety of sources, including text that you paste in, the URL of any blog, blog feed, or any other web page that has an Atom or RSS feed, or it can create a del.icio.us word cloud from a user’s tags.

So, I entered my blog’s URL and the result was this word cloud, which can be customized in many different ways (font, color, layout…). In theory, it visually represents tags or keywords larger than others based upon their frequency of use. I have to admit, I was pleased to see how my cloud displayed in many respects. It would be interesting to do this every month or so and see the evolution (or stagnation) of thought. I wonder if it would accurately represent the main idea or thesis of students’ written work.