Interesting post to keep in mind when I’m talking to administrators:
7 Habits of Highly Effective Tech-Leading Principals
From thejournal.com
I’ve been attending a large museum conference all week. I presented earlier in the week about my project on how museums teach 21st century skills — but more on that in a separate post.
I attended a session today about how to present technology issues to your board. The session was of interest because we often have to explain to people (boards and others) about technology budget requests, why we want to move to a new system, etc. I knew or knew of a number of the presenters, and I knew it would be an interesting and provocative session.
Plant a Seed
There were a number of good points made during the session, but one really stuck out:
Plant a Seed.
The presenter that talked about this concept related a story about a project he proposed once. The group he proposed it to dismissed it immediately, without any discussion or thought. Four years later, that same group proposed the exact same concept and it passed readily! He related this to planting the seed, tending the garden and making it a rich environment in which these ideas grow.
This seems to be my experience working with the schools my kids attend. For the last year, I have been knocking at their doors, asking questions, suggesting ideas, and generally letting them know I think they need to pay more attention to technology and 21st century learning.
It has been frustrating, as I’ve stated in past blog posts. Often, they are too busy to talk. They are dismissive, as if I’m just another annoying parent with issues. They infer that they are the educators, thus know more than I do about this. Or, there is no way I, as a parent, could possibly know what it is like in the classroom. I offer to volunteer, to train, to help out — and I am turned away. And more. It’s been frustrating.
However, I have to admit — I see signs of the seeds taking hold, and maybe starting to sprout. One school rolled out Google Apps for the students fairly quickly. At another place, an administrator asked to meet with me about my work.
Like the presenter today, I have to give it time. As he said, the time between his idea and the adoption was long, but he worked to make people understand his idea — slowly, one step at a time. He was far ahead of them the first time. They needed time to catch up.
While I want the schools to move faster, I have to realize that they have other issues to deal with, and they need to get their thinking to the point where they see the advantages of moving ahead — and disadvantages of the current set-up. They have to be at a point where staying put is no longer an option, where it’s not a threat when their day-to-day work needs to change.
Planting a seed. Maybe if I have that as my goal, rather than full-blown tech integration and teaching of 21st century skills, I’ll feel more successful. Maybe there’s hope. I just hope it doesn’t take four years.
Ran across this study about how undergraduate students use online resources. No surprise – they found that students “…shop around for digital texts and videos beyond the boundaries of what professors assign them in class.”
Students are heavily accessing additional content – beyond the assigned content, and usually from “approved” types of sites, such as other universities or Khan Academy. But they often find them through Google, and prefer to find things on their own rather than ask librarians or teachers.
I’ve been researching how teachers think K-12 students find information. I see some of what this study says: kids look for videos and additional information as well as students using Google.
I’d be very interested in a study such as this on middle and high school students!
Blog post by Heather Wolpert-Gawron about what her students find engaging. This would be a great step for any teacher to take.
Recently had an excellent conversation with the principal of a local high school that is just starting to look at technology integration. We discussed how it is really about teaching and learning differently, not about technology. We discussed doing a survey of students about the technology they have available.
This would another great step to take. What do the kids think would be engaging?
How have I missed the Google Zeitgeists? These are powerful year-in-review videos from Google (I assume based on searches? Or not?)
Having posted in the past about a current events class at a local high school that is not using social media or many online tools, I had to post this. I can only imagine the creative assignments students could do based on this model. It wouldn’t have to be current events, obviously. This could be a powerful history project, a book review for an English class, a lab report for chemistry, etc.
Doesn’t look much like the current events projects I had to do, and that’s fabulous.
I have posted about the fact that my daughter, a freshman in high school, isn’t allowed to use the graphing calculator on her iPhone. We paid $1.99 for this app, and as you would imagine, she has it with her all the time.
Instead, she has to tote around a second $100 device. I had to buy this device last year. If I had had to buy it this year, when she had an iPhone, I would have refused. This is crazy.
Just saw an article about Google working as a graphing calculator. I wonder what the math teachers would say about using Google!!! HAHA! I can only imagine!
Seriously, though, should kids pay for and carry around a device that has one function: a graphing calculator. (OK, I realize that has many functions!!) Or, would it be better to teach kids to use the tools they already know and have? Teach them how to use Google to their advantage.
However, this won’t happen. I just found out that they reuse the tests. My daughter didn’t do very well on a quiz, so she had the chance to fix her mistakes (this is something I do like.) She couldn’t take the test out of the classroom — because they use these same tests in all the geometry classes every year!! So, what did she do? She took a picture of a problem so she could work on it at home. While I commend her for her resourcefulness, this is NOT a good idea in the current culture. (Picture was deleted.)
While I understand that this provides consistency because all kids are tested on the same material and it saves the teacher time, is it really the best option? Does it teach the kids how to solve problems using the tools at hand? Does it teach thinking and problem solving? Are the problems related to the real world, or do they come straight from the textbook??
No wonder she struggles with geometry homework. It has absolutely no relation to her day-to-day life. I know many kids do find motivation in the academic exercise (I did, but only to keep my straight-A average), I doubt most kids do. Go check out Dan Meyer’s blog and TED talk. Then tell me if it’s a good thing that the tests are repeated every year and she’s can’t use her iPhone app.
Do check out Seth Godin’s recent education manifesto, “Stop Stealing Dreams.”
There are many quotable quotes, but here’s just one, about multiple choice tests. Frederick Kelly created multiple choice tests in 1914 as a way to literally assign factory workers. He said:
In the words of Professor Kelly, “This is a test of lower order thinking for the lower orders.”
Yup. And we still do it.
Interesting article, “Rethinking Teaching” from the Oberlin Alumni Magazine about how teaching at Oberlin is changing. Overall, it sounds like they are moving away from the professor lecturing for hours to student created content and visual learning. Collaboration between departments is increasing, which in the end is a win-win.
Steven Volk, a History professor, is using a flipped classroom model. He has students watch a 30-minute lecture on video before class. Then, in-class time is spent on discussion. He seeks to create a community of learners.
We know that the way students learn best is to construct knowledge in their own heads.
– Steven Volk, History prof
Professor Volk seeks to teach students to think and work with material, to to memorize facts:
Volk doesn’t expect his students to recall all the details they’ve discussed in class — after all, they have smart phones if they need to know that Bolivia’s independence from Spain took hold in 1825. He approaches his classes with what he calls the “backward planning” hypothetical. “If I bump into one of my students 10 years after graduation, what do I want them to remember?” he says. “Not the details, but the concepts and the learning skills: how to investigate, read closely, analyze, interpret, and work with others.”
I think one of the problems with moving to a more integrated technology framework at schools is that people think it implies that students don’t learn like they did before. Kids don’t read. Kids don’t focus. Kids don’t write. Kids don’t….. etc.
Somehow, there is the attitude that if kids aren’t learning like kids learned 20, 30, years ago, then it’s not valid.
But really, do any of us learn and consume information like we did 10, 20 years ago? I doubt it.
Look at newspapers – even if you read a printed paper (and I do – I get two papers delivered to my door every day), the newspaper is different than it was 30 years ago and certainly different than it was 50, 75, 100 years ago. Pictures were non-existent and very rare. Articles were much longer. Print was much smaller. That’s how people got information. Not now – photographs are prevalent, stories are shorter, fonts are bigger, infographics and maps visually represent information that wasn’t possible to communicate before.
How about YouTube? The viral nature of some videos is amazing. If you need to know how to do something? Kids will check YouTube before looking anywhere else. How to tie a tie? Much easier to communicate if you have a video than to describe in a book. Cooking? Same thing. Building something? Same thing. The instructional possibilities of using video are huge.
The list could go on. How about art history classes? Are they still making slides? Or using collections found on many museum sites to build lectures?
So, why are schools (not every school/teacher, thankfully!) so resistant to meeting students’ learning needs through visuals? Why has coursework not moved in the direction of working with increasing visual learning? Why still rely on heavy print texts and assignments?
Moving to visual does not mean dumbing down.
Thanks to Diane Ravitch for the link to this great article about dyslexia. Many thanks to the author, Steve Dingledine.
The current movement towards using appropriate tools in the classroom, whether it is an iPad, Chromebook, laptop, whatever, is a step in the right direction of allowing students with dyslexia — or any other learning disability, difference, or even just students who learn best in different modalities (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.) — the chance to really be successful in school. A learning difference should not equate not being successful at school and in life.
…many dyslexics have other cognitive skills in abundance, including visualization and intuition. They can also see problems and solutions in the big-picture frame and can detect obscure patterns in unique and, at times, revolutionary ways.
The education system owes it to these kids – those with dyslexia or any other sort of learning difference – to adapt the SYSTEM to the kids. The kids shouldn’t have to suppress or ignore their natural skills in order to learn.
Dyslexics and other non-conformists need time and space to grow within school contexts. Their creative genius and divergent thinking needs to be incorporated into classrooms and not stifled.Their teachers need to have the flexibility and freedom to nurture their strengths and talents while helping them to reach their potential on their terms.
Like the author of the post, I am a textual learner. His wife is dyslexic. My daughter has not been diagnosed with dyslexia, but has considerable trouble with text based learning. She is a strong visual learner. I really appreciated this thought:
Our society, unbeknownst to me beforehand, is heavily geared to text-based learning and work activities. The emphasis on reading text, which creates “winners” and “losers” through standardized tests and entrance exams…
My (many) previous posts about my daughter’s choice for an advanced social studies course next year have focused on the responsibility of the schools to provide an adequate education for all learners — not just text based learners. It’s going to be a struggle to get them to accomodate my daughter’s needs, but why should just the kids who are text based learners have access to the advanced content and be considered “smart?”
Hopefully we’ll see things changing as schools move more towards allowing and encouraging students to make use of technology tools and the paradigm shifting that happens (or should.)
My Wired Life 