EdTechTrek

Well, 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?

This video, titled “What I Want for My Children”,  is a good follow-up to my last post. I think it speaks for itself. So much gets in the way of this message becoming a ubiquitous reality in U.S. schools.

The answer isn’t PowerPoint, digital whiteboards, blogs, wikis, PRS systems, high-speed Internet, Web2.0, … But, they can be part of a solution. [Generalization coming...] Why are we not pushing many of these attributes presented in the video with the same passion that we are pushing (and adopting) new technologies? As a geek-at-heart, it sure is much easier to get excited about “potential” or promise of new technologies rather than focus what we already have that is not working. Much of the time, things are not “working” because of much bigger issues than old technologies or technical support (don’t get me wrong… technical support is crucial). So, if your students are not excited about your language arts (math, science, social studies…) program, ask yourself “Why?”. My guess is that it’s not mostly because they are not using the aforementioned technologies.

I would encourage you to read one of David Warlick’s recent posts titled, “If it’s not about technology, then what is it about?“. Be sure to have a look through the comments as well. Lots of food for thought. (It’s where I discovered this video, too.)

I love this excerpt that I ran across in Darren Draper’s blog, Drape’s Takes. It comes from Carl Glickman’s book, Leadership for learning: How to Help Teachers Succeed. I re-post it here in case you missed it.

An article published in ASCD’s Educational Leadership also resonated with me. It is titled, Closing the Teacher Quality Gap and it looks at how often the weakest teachers are often paired with the weakest or most needy students and that teacher quality has everything to do with student achievement… not surprising.

We talk so much about how technology can empower teachers and students and transform learning. But we need to talk more about teacher quality in this conversation as well. Seeking improvement needs to be an active process that requires an attitude of growth and professionalism - oftentimes lacking. It doesn’t happen on its own. That’s what I like so much about the Carl Glickman excerpt. I have worked with some teachers who have approached setting mandated learning goals with resentment and would simply go through the motions of putting down goals that were easy to achieve and relatively benign. Others took them seriously and set meaningful, relevant goals.If you are going to teach, you’d better be prepared to give 100 percent… perhaps 110 percent. There is no room for less when over the course of your career you have the privilege to teach hundreds, perhaps thousands of other people’s children and contribute to their future. After all, they are not blueberries.

What did your child do at school today?

In a recent news report from the UK, an informal poll uncovered that students at UK laptop schools are spending class/lesson time on social network sites.

“Global Secure Systems (GSS) – “an IT security consultancy, has uncovered the alarming reality that UK school children are studying social networking websites during their lessons instead of what they should be concentrating on. In its survey, conducted through Facebook, to discover just how widespread the issue of children visiting sites of this nature at inappropriate times is, a staggering 52 per cent of the 1000 children aged between 13 and 17 who participated, confessed that they did so during lessons. Over a quarter admitted they were doing so for in excess of 30 minutes a day!”

And then, another issue is raised in this article:

“Kids are potentially wasting as much as two and a half hours a week of lessons on Facebook. I recognise that there is a place for social networking, with a whole new generation now relying on it to communicate, but not at the expense of an education. Schools could learn a lesson from industry and ensure school children productively use the internet. Through the deployment of software, access to inappropriate websites can either be completely blocked, or limited to break time, economically and efficiently.”

And then finally…

“In a separate GSS poll, conducted with Infosecurity Europe 2008, it discovered that the recent popularity of social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, is costing UK corporations close to £6.5 billion annually in lost productivity. GSS itself as a company recently clamped down on social networking during working hours. When faced with the need for additional bandwidth, David Hobson their MD, analysed why and discovered that by simply restricting the times that sites of this nature could be accessed to lunchtimes and after close of business there was no longer the need to increase bandwidth and so saved thousands of pounds.”

So, here’s what I have been thinking about lately in relation to this. It is no doubt that filtering at school is problematic. Sites teachers and students need are often blocked. There is a great deal of red tape in order to get needed sites unblocked. Some sites never get unblocked because the powers on high decide that they are not worthy of being unblocked. Blocking of needed sites and reasonable keyword searches severely interferes with learning on a day to day basis. It interferes with teachers trying to use current and valuable resources in their classrooms. If forces unreasonable planning in order to get needed sites unblocked before they are to be used in the classroom. It undermines just-in-time use of Internet resources. And, it communicates to teachers that they are not professional enough to manage filter settings on their own. I am sure that there are other issues at play here.

But, the business world has had to check employee personal use of network usage due to loss in productivity. A great deal of on-the-clock time has been wasted on personal Internet usage and communication (browsing, email, video, booking trips, making personal purchases….). I have no doubt that employers have every right to make sure that their employees are spending their paid time working for the employer and not conducting personal business. And, as David Hobson suggests, it would be fine for employers to pause such restriction during lunch times and after hours. Yet Clarence Fisher over on Remote Access has a recent post about Google successfully allowing its employees 10-20% of their job time to persue their own interests and what if we did this similar thing in education. However, this is different from “class time” where students do have specific tasks to be attending to. It is interesting to consider, nonetheless.

So, is it then acceptable to do the same in education? It it acceptable for students to shun instructional and learning time in lieu of personal network communication and browsing… regardless of the reason?? Would parents support such decisions? Would it be acceptable for an employee to rationalize such wasted productivity time with the reason that they were not particularly engaged in their work and were not really enjoying the tasks that were set before them to accomplish?

Now, I am not in any way excusing poor instruction or lack of relevant learning opportunities in classrooms. I am not excusing the lack of vision and creativity that often occurs. However, I do feel that students are losing their ability to attend to verbal information and to complete tasks that perhaps are not of their preference. Of course, this is nothing new. There have always been students who doodle, pass notes, daydream, and have bad attitudes when they are not particularly engaged in the learning tasks set for them. And, teachers are obligated to read such behavior and body language and adapt their instruction so that they are meeting the needs of their students. But, the “discipline of learning” (see Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death) seems to be undermined as students have unfettered access to Internet resources during instructional time. There have been countless reports by educators at all levels on this topic (laptops in the classroom/lecture hall), so I am not going to summarize all of those here. Due to this issue, guidelines are being established my many institutions.

My question is this, though. What is the balance point between effective teaching along with expectations for student learning and excusing students’ lack of ability to learn, be interested and attend (drifting off into cyberspace instead) - on learning that does not meet their “style” or interest level? At what point do we expect students to learn content and learn it in ways that those with experience know (teachers) are still very valuable, but perhaps not so sexy or appealing… and just plain hard work? I am not talking about differentiation, learning styles or multiple intelligences here. I think sometimes we are communicating that if we are not using podcasts, blogs, wikis, laptops, and the like… that we somehow cannot be effective teachers - that students will choose to ignore us if we don’t use the tools that they like. Again, I am not arguing against the use of these tools and their related practices… I support them wholeheartedly. But when students cannot sit and listen to an intelligent, developmentally appropriate and compelling (and I stress all three of these attributes) “lecture” and take an active part in related discussion (or even pose relevant questions) for more than a few minutes without losing interest or comprehension, then perhaps the tools and media that “speak to them” so much are actually diminishing their capacity to think and learn at more abstract levels. Are these students truly multitaskers who can have 2 or more tasks going on simultaneously (listening and answering email for example) while achieving a level of excellence on all of them? Or, is quality somehow compromised as a result of the multitasking (like the inability to seriously consider what is being discusses and participate in discussion and question generation)? Personally, some of the “backchanneling” that I have been a part of has either been a distraction to fully listening to the presenter or a distraction due to the tangential and even off-topic chatter going on. Of course, there has also been some great backchanneling as well. Would we accept off-task backchanneling in our classrooms? We don’t in the physical sense. So, should we in the virtual sense? Is student lack of interest and inability to attend ALWAYS the product of poor teaching? Sorry for the rhetorical question here.

Anyway, at the risk of being called an technological heretic, these are all of the issues that this article brought to mind for me. Sorry for the rambling nature of the post. I am certainly not arguing against technological and educational innovation, creativity, and socially-mediated meaning-making. I just don’t think that the issues around education, filtering, new tools, network access, and cultural shifts are all that simple. We are quick to blame teachers who are not adapting quickly enough. But could it be that this type of shift is much messier, harder to make and more complex than others? Please set me straight if I am way off here.

Well, it goes like this: My son, who is in third grade, gets home and is telling me about his day. I know, he won’t be doing this much longer. He tells me that he had computer lab today. He tells me they worked on keyboarding skills. He tells me they work on keyboarding skills every time they go to the computer lab. He tells me it gets boring doing it for 30 minutes. He tells me that even if you finish the lesson early, you have to go back and do it again. He tells me that every 5 weeks they get free choice. This is his experience with computers at school.

What does this tell you?