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?

I have been thinking lately of the onslaught of new tools and related learning potential that they hold. Over the past few years there has just been an onslaught of new tools and services out there. Some are still around, some have fallen by the wayside. Many of these tools fall in the Web 2.0 category. (here and here, to list a “few”). The discussions and implementations with EdTech folks have been just as numerous. I totally understand the desire to find those “perfect” tools and tools to transform “same-old” learning into learning that is culturally relevant and personally meaningful. I get that. I think about these things all the time. However, there is something innate in the tech “geek” that drives us on to try every new thing coming down the pike and to abandon tools that worked just fine for newer, shinier, cooler tools that have that one (or 100) extra feature that just makes it superior. Yet, often they are not advantages that the average teacher would take advantage of - or would even care about. Sometimes I think we are doing the typical teacher a disservice with our insatiable appetite for new tools. And, I do get the need in this time to be able to quickly adapt to new tools as old ones become extinct. However, many teachers need simple tools tied to powerful learning opportunities. I think that they feel the same inundation of innovation and simply shut down. We need to sell them on the pedagogical, not the technical. On the true learning innovation, not the innovative tools. On the passion and excitement of being in control of learning, not on controlling learning. On the power of creative production of meaningful learning artifacts, not on glitzy but empty products.

Here is a iPhone product called FriendBook that caught my eye and drove me on to write this post. I used this example in one of my comments on Will Richardson’s latest blog posts titled, “What I Hate About Twitter“. It is an interesting conversation on the value of a tool like Twitter. It is interesting to the the diversity of responses to Will’s initial thoughts. But back to my point - Friendbook allows iPhone users to “beam” to each other their contact information/address book cards.
The headline of the promo states “Business cards are so last year.” There will always be new (communication) tools out there that have advantages and disadvantages. However, we all need to get past those and seek after what is important - not simply cast aside old tools in search of the latest greatest ones. It’s not the business card per se, but the message it conveys and the audience it reaches. I think it is the same with Twitter. It is not the tool per se, but the messages that get conveyed and the audiences who choose to listen and participate.

No tool will do it all FOR us. There is no “Holy Grail” of tools that will make good teaching easy. It takes sweat, tears, devotion, passion, dedication, intelligence, skill, professionalism, continued learning and growth, collaboration, risk-taking, networking, wide reading, deep reading,… and you could add many attributes to this list as well. It does not require a trendy approach to computer applications. There is nothing wrong with the traditional business card if it gets desired results. I fear we are communicating too much that “traditional” = bad and that “cutting edge” = good. This is so wrong, so distorted, so deceptive. My previous post on Good Vs. Effective relates to this a great deal here.

So, let’s get more passionate about learning and less passionate about needing to be “up” on every new tool that gets churned out. Let’s help reading teachers become more effective and passionate about teaching the language arts in powerful and relevant ways. Let’s help math and science teachers become more effective and passionate about teaching and reaching kids in effective ways - in realistic ways. Yes - these ways should include relevant technologies. Don’t abandon digital microscopes or data probes just because they don’t carry a Web 2.0 label. Don’t ignore programming just because it is not your thing. And, don’t get so hung up on tools like Twitter. Get hung up on powerful learning.

To quote Mariana Umaschi Bers who cites Seymour Papert:

“The power of computers for education lies in their potential to assist children in encountering powerful ideas and to engage them in experimenting with and testing these ideas”.

“Once the technology is sunk deep enough into the culture, the social effects that get built on it simultaneously require the technology and aren’t about the technology.”

~Clay Shirkey

So true.

Yet we must continually examine those “social effects” rather than get too giddy about the required technologies. Too many discussions are focused on these required technologies (and a google alternatives) rather than looking hard at the social effects that result from new technological “enablers”. Taking the view of Neil Postman and others, technology is not always enabling “good” things. Seamless, transparent technology is certainly the goal in the classroom so that it is the learning that is the focus, not the technology. Otherwise, learning outcomes become secondary to the exciting new technologies and users become blinded by the “technology delusion”. This reminded my of an article worth reading and thinking about, written by Todd Oppenheimer in 1997, titled, The Computer Delusion. Things have evolved since he wrote it, but it is still worth reading. I love this last quotation:

“The purpose of the schools [is] to, as one teacher argues, ‘Teach carpentry, not hammer,’” he testified. “We need to teach the whys and ways of the world. Tools come and tools go. Teaching our children tools limits their knowledge to these tools and hence limits their futures.”

A good reminder…