iTeacher

Great food for thought!

I came across this video on Tim Holt’s Intended Consequences blog.  It has some excellent quotes from educational visionaries who are working to steer us in the right direction as far as preparing this generation of students for life in the 21st century.  Great stuff.

I just read a fascinating article in The Journal entitled 21st Century Teaching and Learning: Assessing New Knowledge by Dr. Ruth Reynard. The article discusses the evolving role of teachers as they respond to new demands of the global, hi-tech, inter-connected world. Dr. Reynard states:

Much has been discussed about the new roles teachers and students play in learning environments created by using new technology and the types of skills required of students in this century. Those skills tend to be softer skills like team building, cooperative communication strategies, self-direction, and the academic skills of critical and applied thinking, new knowledge construction and collaborative learning techniques.

Dr. Reynard goes on to say:

… current educational trends based on standards and tests lean towards teacher-driven instruction, while the required 21st century skills of higher order thinking skills, application of technology, and adapting to change and workplace skills, among others, require new methods and new assessment measures.

To address the skill requirements of the 21st century, teachers should assess the process of learning rather than just the outcome. Evaluating the methods in which a student reaches an outcome should hold just as much importance as the outcome itself. As you can see, the content of instruction does not change, just the method of assessment. In this scenario, students still gain the content knowledge, but they also strengthen their own metacognitive skills. They learn how to think, not just recall information.

Recognizing and valuing the “how” and the “why” (ie, the thinking process) will help our students build the cognitive and problem-solving skills required to meet the ever-changing demands of the 21st century.

I wanted to share with you an excellent commentary published in Education Week (April 2, 2008) by Andrew A. Zucker, author of Transforming Schools with Technology: How Smart Use of Digital Tools Helps Achieve Six Key Educational Goals.

The article, entitled Smart Thinking About Educational Technology, argues that educators need to stop thinking simplistically about educational technologies and begin thinking about how to use these digital tools well. Too much time is spent arguing whether or not educational technology improves student achievement, rather than focusing on how it can help us reach key educational goals.

Zucker proposes using a widely-accepted framework of six key educational goals to help concentrate our focus and meet multiple aims. These educational goals are not technology specific - they meet wider educational objectives. However, upon inspection, one can easily see how educational technology can be employed to help achieve these goals.

As I have always argued, educational technology is not an all-or-nothing notion. Productive pedagogy must always be the main focus. The use of educational technology can enhance learning in significant ways only when it is backed by sound pedagogy and wider educational goals.

Wow, it’s been a month since my last posting.  Things have been very busy as we Australians complete another school year.  I apologize for falling off the radar.  I plan to reinvigorate iTeacher in 2008 after re-establishing myself in the United States.

I have been living and teaching in Australia since 2003.  I grew up in Ohio and married an Australian in 2001.  My wife and I are moving back to Ohio in February to live closer to family.  We will miss Australia greatly but know we will visit this country throughout the rest of our lives.

I will spend the next few months re-settling and job seeking, so you may not see much activity on iTeacher in the meantime.  If you know of anyone in Ohio looking for a technology integration specialist, by all means direct them to my portfolio at http://robitaille.weebly.com.  (Hey, it’s worth a plug!)  Have a happy holiday season everyone.

I came across this excellent article by Martin Levins when reading my November issue of Australian MacWorld. Levins is a teacher and director of Information Technology at the Armidale School in New South Wales, Australia.

Levins article, “Caged”, discusses his theory on why educational reform is so slow with regards to technology integration in classrooms. Not an article about technology itself, this brilliant essay uncovers the pedagogical constraints that underpin the slow uptake of technology in the educational sector. The article raises many important issues that educators should be discussing when forming or auditing their school’s technology immersion program.

---

Mention the surname “Cage” most will probably think of the actor Nicolas, or the American music composer, John.John is probably best known for his 1952 composition 4’33”, whose three movements are performed in “silence” without a single note being played. Not many know that he was a bit of a philosopher as well, once claiming: “I can’t understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I’m frightened by old ones.”What are the “old ideas” that should frighten us? First, let’s look at how we view change. Calling a motor vehicle a “horseless carriage” seems quaint now – the province of black and white movies – but the phrase is indicative of the way we think when we experience change. A carriage was for, well, carrying, and the horse provided the (ahem) horsepower. So everything remains the same, except for the fuel, and less manure.Similarly, the development of technology in education can result in our doing the same sort of teaching and learning as we always have.

It’s a sad indictment that a didactic, industrial mode education is still acceptable and measurements of success boil down (in a lot of areas) to how many marks you can amass in one three-hour time period.

So it’s not surprising that the “new ideas” promised by technology are rejected, nor that the technology itself becomes the focus.

I’ve recently heard claims that the installation of Interactive White Boards can result in 100 percent of teachers using the appropriate digital tools, but I question the word “appropriate.” I have yet to see much use of these in any way other than didactic. Their very placement would support this mode of “delivery”, with teachers as a sort of academic FedEx.

I don’t believe that a kids’ mind should be considered as a tabula rasa, ready for ideas to be delivered like so much pizza. Rather I believe a child’s mind to be a plastic organisational thingy that tries to make sense of its surroundings and builds its own model of its environment.

The argument goes that older teachers will resist the uptake of technology, so let’s give them something simpler – like an Interactive White Board.

It’s tempting to state that as we age, our brain, like our skin, becomes less plastic, but this isn’t the case. People of all ages will accept technologies when they are seen to be enabling, empowering, engaging and relevant to the user. Good teachers will pick up good ideas because they are good teachers, they see that things have changed “since they went to school” and want to adapt their teaching and learning experiences accordingly.

Others will adopt a technology that supports their teacher-centric, didactic comfort zone only so someone can check a box that says “We use technology in teaching.” This is not a recent complaint – in the early 1990s, Larry Cuban advanced his “oversold and underused” argument, proposing that a lot of technology is there for its own sake (although a lot of technology has changed since he wrote this).

In an interview conducted in 2000 he said, “We need to ask the right questions. What are the goals of schooling? Do we care most about literacy? Social development? Other goals? The school community needs to reach a consensus, then ask, ‘Now, how might the technology help us reach these goals?’”

Can we reach a consensus?

Parents are a big part of our community. Yet there is a basic disconnect between their view of education and the reform that technology both invites and expedites. Schools need to be careful that parents are included in the decision matrix, but they need to recognise that parents need educating too. With couples having children at an increasingly older age, it can easily be 20-25 years since a parent of a year seven child attended school.

Old ideas are quite scary here as they impede this reform, exacerbating thei problems faced by a student facing a world that has moved on from the industrial age.

“My child needs to practise handwriting” , “computers are only used for word processing and surfing the web” , and “computers will make my child less creative” are examples of these old ideas.

No amount of cool technology will advance its use. We have to escape the cargo cult mentality of technology accumulation, hoping for reform. Reform of pedagogy is where we need to focus – even when the leopard is let out of the cage – so let’s get out of ours.

As I network with other teachers I am amazed by the amount of censorship happening in our schools with regards to the Internet. Sites of immensely valuable educational value are being blocked because of the fear students may come across indecent content.

YouTube is blocked from all government schools in the Australian state of Victoria. Tens of thousands of students are missing out on an educational gold mine. Hundreds of teachers cannot access the endless library of resources provided on YouTube. I rarely go a week without showing something to one of my classes that I discovered on YouTube.

A high school down the road from me has instituted a policy barring any references to Wikipedia in student assignments. Why? Because the administrators feel that Wikipedia cannot be trusted as a reliable source. So they banned it. The zillions of incredible entries contained on that site have no educational value to the students at this school. Instead of teaching their students about critical literacies and verifying facts through multiple resources, this school took the easy road and banned Wikipedia.

I do not envy the position our administrators are in. They have to safeguard our students against the smut, dangers and mistruths contained on the Internet. They are responsible to parents when children encounter questionable material.

However, censorship and overzealous Internet filtering only add frustration to students and teachers trying to find legitimate information. We shouldn’t have to censor the web in schools if we are supervising our students’ Internet activity. If we log all visited websites in our students’ accounts and actually pay attention to what they’re doing on the computer, they will not have the opportunity to misuse the Internet. If we provide ongoing education in cyberethics from a very young age, students by and large will not use school computers to visit unsavory sites.

I work in a school that provides limited Internet filtering. All of our students’ Internet activity is logged, and they know it. Whenever students use computers, they are under direct adult supervision (as it should be). Cyberethics is revisited many times throughout the year. As a result, I average one or two incidents per year where a student intentionally violates our acceptable use policy. Students are just not game to try anything because they know they’ll get caught.

Blocking sites and heavily filtering the Internet is the easy thing to do. Educating our students to become ethical, responsible, self-regulating users of the Internet requires a lot more effort. I guess we must ask ourselves, how can we best prepare our students to become the leaders of the 21st century?

I hear a lot of comments from concerned adults about the antisocial behaviour of our wired youths. It is claimed that these digital natives have lost the important element of human interaction. It would appear that they would prefer to listen to their iPod or play their PSP rather than socializing with other human beings. They get on the Internet every evening and then spend hours pressing buttons on those irritating mobile phones.

I argue the opposite. The children today are just as social, if not more social, than their preceding generations. When we think they’re wasting time on their mobile phones, they’re usually sending text messages back and forth to friends. When they’re glued to the computer for hours, they’re usually chatting with friends, sending emails and engaging in countless other social networking activities. They’re often having different conversations with different people simultaneously. They’re always in touch and always socializing. These electronic conversations are very real to them and not a poor substitute for face-to-face interaction.

We confuse their engagement with electronic media with antisocial behaviour. We label them as introverts. We say that they’re losing the ability to interact with humans.

Rubbish!

Interacting with humans is mostly what they’re doing with their time. Their network of friends is larger than ours ever was. They’re always in contact with each other, always connected. They collaborate their ideas far more than my generation did. They see all of this new technology as a social platform to share ideas, keep in touch, be creative and work together.

I’ve had to argue the educational benefits of wikis to so many adults who still view education as an individual endeavour. But when I introduced wikis to my students, they took to it immediately. They ran to the computers and began collaborating. They shared their ideas, made improvements upon each other’s work, and produced a well-oiled final product. And they did it together. This is what makes sense to them. They are an extremely social, connected bunch of kids. Like everything else in their “connected” lives, they see education as a social activity.

I think they’re on to something!