21st Century Educator

Well I have hit a huge response on the previous post – Probably a record for my blog. While the fire of thought provoking conversation is still burning I thought I would write a few more thoughts around the idea of how new technical tools are integrated into schools. I had the wonderful pleasure last year seeing many different schools around the country and in other parts of the globe. I saw so many amazing examples of technology being used effectively, but also saw some tragic examples of money being wasted. With this in mind as well as the thoughts from the previous post I want to throw some ideas around.

Who should control and make decisions on technology integration into schools?

This is the main area that I see schools completely stuffing up time and time again. For me this is simple… Curriculum and sound pedagogical thought and procedure should always drive technology integration. Too many technical departments and System Administrators etc etc are making decisions that ultimately impact on effective learning environments. The role of our hard working techies is vital in any education environment but when decisions are made on technical matters, not educational concerns I sit and wonder what the point really is. Too many schools use technology as a show and tell tool for the community – in a desperate hope that parents and others in the community will think more highly of the service they provide. Hence why I think IWB’s are sweeping the country as the next fad – these tools are easy to support by tech departments and they are a great show and tell tool. They are not connected devices and they do not cause problems on the network infrastructure. If an IWB breaks down it doesn’t bring the system to a halt – but there is a risk with tools such as student laptops. Perhaps a reason why more schools are not investigating what are seen as “risky” programs? Once again I understand the pressures techies work under (my brother is one at a school not far from me) and I can see a huge problem rising in the challenge schools face keeping good technical staff. Schools cannot compete with corporate wage rates. I had a close friend who was working in the tech department of a very wealthy school not too long ago – He left with in 2 years of being in the job as the corporate pay offers were just far too tempting…. Question here – How do we keep the techies that support the educational environment, while maintaining complete decision making control over the whole technology integration process?

What about the client?

While I completely disagree with the concept as teachers working for a client (parents paying fees etc etc) and feel that this is a philosophy of thought that is destroying the credibility of professional educators, I do think we need to think about the client as in the student/learner and their needs. I enjoyed reading a recent article about the 16 year old that just cracked the 84million dollar pornography filtering system created by our Government. The journalist asked him what he thinks needs to be done in this digital age. He suggested we hold student forums where students can talk about their worries and concerns about education in the digital age. What a great idea, I would love to be involved with a conference run by students telling me as an educator what matters to them. I would enjoy hearing how they feel I could better engage them and which technologies make a difference to their learning (an example of this can be downloaded as a podcast from Education.au event recently). We need to stop thinking about what parents want and start looking objectively at what students feel will help them learn and try and match this with the research that has been done on effective learning technologies.

Picture this – student is studying in the school library for a series of Biology exams, he really enjoys his class but didn’t understand the way his teacher and the text book has explained the issues around gene therapy – So the student heads off to Andrew Douch’s Biology podcast and syncs some of his classes on the topic to his ipod. Our student then puts on his ipod to listen to Mr Douch’s explanation of the topic – What would happen to this student in most schools I have seen? Well he would be reprimanded for using his iPod at school in the library – iPod’s are contraband… student is issued with detention and gets frustrated because the teacher is unable or unwilling to see what is really going on.

Can I propose a student forum concept – how could we organise such an event?

Just spent the last few days at this year’s Interactive Whiteboard Conference. I commend those who organised the event and my views here are at all no reflection on those who put many hours into organising such a large event. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the event FOC. I have never been convinced on the effectiveness of these tools for student learning - therefore, wanted to take this chance to have folk demonstrate to me how this tool could be used in such a way to benefit student learning. Well I must say no one could convince me - I kept an open mind for the two days and asked plenty of questions. Why couldn’t anyone give me a good answer to this one question -”How does this improve student learning?” I was frustrated as person after person gave me the same answer over and over again - Everyone was convinced it improves test scores!!! AHHHHH!!! Since when do test scores tell us if a student is learning. I get so frustrated at this narrow minded, uneducated and archaic concept of learning.

So I continued walking through the trade hall, spending time with vendors and educators who just raved about their different versions of IWB’s. I kept asking questions and requesting demos of what the different applications could be used for - time after time I kept having horrible flashbacks to my junior science teacher who had all of his science notes and lessons on Overhead transparencies. I failed to see the difference in the learning that was occurring - sure the presentations skills and method was very impressive, but no one could show me how a presentation, “Sage on the Stage” style could suddenly be an effective learning concept simply by using these devices. I continued to look over the literature that the vendors were displaying - Big posters boldly declaring that with an IWB I (as a teacher) would never hear “I’M BORED” ever again. hmmmm….. I couldn’t help but feel the irony of such a claim as the vendor continued to bore me with a PowerPoint presentation that had the most tacky transitions and horrible colour scheme possible.

My mission continued to find someone that could convince me that there was something exciting in this entire concept. So I headed off to the MAC lab where some folk were doing demos with iLife - surely I could find something interesting here?? Well the presentation was interesting but the IWB integration was once again just a flash presenting tool. In fact we just ended up doing activities with iLife on the computers - ironic moment again came when I heard from at least 3 teachers in the room “My students would love doing this on their computers.” Oh so now we sit at a conference dedicated to a presenting tool and all realise that there is more benefit in having our students creating with the humble computer?!?!?! Oh and the irony of the opening keynote….. Testimonials from Seymour Pappert and the one laptop per child initiative…. Just do a google search on these guys and see if their philosophies fit a IWB style classroom??

Some conclusions….
1) These devices are better than traditional whiteboards or blackboards….
2) They are a step forward in presentation skills as they do provide a great medium to present multimedia….
3) They are certainly a step BACK in terms of student learning… They reinforce the horrible idea that the teacher is the fountain of all knowledge and ALL learning requires a teacher.
4) They disconnect our connected students…. we need to have tools that help us engage a generation of students that are connected to so many different sources of knowledge. Like it or not we have to embrace this fact and provide learning opportunities that connect these students.
5) Where is the evidence that this really does make a difference to student learning??? Oh and please don’t feed me test score data!!

I would like to finish with some thoughts from David Loader’s latest book “Jousting for the new generation.”

“An undesirable consequence of schooling is that if you wish to learn, you need to have a teacher. My understanding is that the learning goal is for students to take responsibility for their learning. We need tools that support students such as books, computers, curriculum, peers and adults. A classroom is not a circus tent where we sit around the performing actor and admire their performance. Rather, it is a setting that puts the student at the centre of the action in the real world.”

Well I welcome thoughts and feedback….

Well it has been some time but I have finally organised myself and got some video files organised for another podcast. These four files go through a Mathematics lesson I did recently with a “reluctant” group of year 9 (14 years old) students. I explain the context of the lesson further during the podcast. This was a bit of an experiment with the new iWork and iLife suite from Apple. I would do this again as a way of providing resource to students for revision etc. However, I wouldn’t use an exercise like this too often and would never want to use it for more than 10mins at a time.

Look forward to receiving some feedback….

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4