Teaching With Technology != A How To

Some would say that for at least the last ten years, teaching has been heavily scripted to address the State Standards and No Child Left Behind. It has been so scripted that I have heard from folks in other districts that teaching in some case, for example the teaching of language arts, has boiled down to following a tight pacing calendar and essentially reading from a script in the adopted textbook. This has resulted in flat achievement scores and an increase in support remediation for those students that do not get the content the first or second time it is presented to them in the classroom. In addition, students entering the workforce, or entering higher education, are often left with basic academic skills and no knowledge of how to apply those skills. They lack critical thinking skills, communication skills, and their focus centers on finding the “correct answer.” They wait to be told what they should do next as opposed to being able to ask questions, research answers to those questions, share their thoughts with others, and elicit feedback to improve their original ideas. These challenges voiced by industry and are not solely the result of poor K12 institutions as higher ed shoulders some of the blame and often produces similar results. Talk to any recent graduate about the difficulty of finding work, and listen to industry and their inability to find employees that possess the necessary skills for the current workforce: creativity, imagination, critical thinking skills, collaboration, synthesis and development and you will hear the same message. We are failing to prepare our students for the world they are inheriting. Our world now requires individuals to be connected, collaborative, and possess participatory set of characteristics. Our world is no longer one which will support an individual who learns for the first 22 years of their life and is then set for life. Our ever changing world requires that individuals continue to learn, unlearn, and create themselves over and over throughout their lives, year after year.

In some respects, teaching with technology have less to do with technology and more to do with improving our listening, assessing, and creative abilities. Assessment in this regards does not mean increasing the number of bubble-in standardized assessments we give our students. Assessment means using our professional skills at diagnosing the learner’s difficulty and being able to prescribe a strategy to address those deficiencies. It requires that teachers can acknowledge individual interests in their students, connect in a meaningful way, and creatively wrap those interests around practices that improve the student’s deficiencies. Up to this point in time the tools and strategies we have had at our disposal to help in designing solutions that address student deficiencies has been limited.

In the “good ol’ days” technology required hours and hours of tinkering with the beige boxes and even then you were limited to what you could achieve. Fortunately for us, technology is becoming consumerized. It is less a black art done by geeky people with broken glasses and bad haircuts. Now the power of technology is available to the toddler at the touch of their finger.

Beyond the cost of technology, and even that has been reduced greatly since the days of the black & beige boxes, the real challenge has nothing to do with the physical technology. The real challenge of teaching with technology is the mental aspect. It is the ambiguity of not knowing where a student might stumble, discovering their deficiency by careful analysis and then expertly designing a solution. In the past those solutions were limited due to our tools. We now have the ability to look at multiple solutions, shared with us by our own created support networks, presented in ways we have not thought of, and with the ability of delivering those solutions to the student in a manner that has not been available to us in the past. Examples of solutions could be in the form of, in this case at the substitution level by a teacher (SAMR Model), discovering a YouTube video that provides the same direct instruction to the student in a new light, or in another example by having a student discover their own disconnect by utilizing the student’s metacognition skills and self-recording themselves using an app like Explain Everything.

In many of our schools, the idea of 1:1 technology projects, where the student has access to technology 24/7 is foreign. Many schools have no reference point for what this looks like in their environments. They have nothing to compare it to and as a result, they try to compare it to things they’ve done in the past or how technology is used in students’ homes currently. There is no common language for staff, school boards, or parents. For districts planning and discussing 1:1 technology projects, the challenge is creating that common language before actually being in the middle of it all, and continuing the language development while in the midst of it. It is similar to the commercial by EDS, Building Airplanes in the Sky,

The key to a successful 1:1 program is promoting those desired characteristics (creativity, imagination, critical thinking skills, collaboration, synthesis and development) in our students, while at the same time making an effort to improve our own skills. Some would suggest that we need to create collections of lessons that utilize the technology before we allow students to get their hands on the tools. This, in my opinion, shows a nearsightedness related to the idea that we would even know what the needs of our students are going to be that far in advance. That kind of thinking gets us back to doing things the way we have always done them, and in my opinion, goes against the whole principle of rethinking school. I do think we can build strategies in teachers regarding instruction, but I’m not sure creating actual lessons in advance of knowing our students would be helpful. In my opinion being able to effectively diagnose the learning deficiencies in our actual students plays a huge part in designing effective lessons. That can only occur when we have evaluated the students that are sitting in front of us, we have a network of educators we can share our ideas with, we are willing to try creative solutions with the realization that if our first solution does not work, we will learn from it, and try another.

Textbook image courtesy of  Wesley Fryer on Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/wfryer/2366672802/sizes/o/in/photostream/

When Databases Ruled the Earth

When people think of computers and technology taking over civilization, they often think about armed robots, or robots with super human power such as in the Will Smith movie “I, Robot.” If technology and robots due take over it will be much more subtle than that. In a similar plot line, many people feel that education, and teachers in general, will be replaced by technology and computers. We do not have to worry so much with the threat of super human robots taking over, but what we should be cognitive of is the degree to which computers can store data, analyze data, compare vast amounts of data, and synthesize new information in just a blink of an eye.

In education we have evidence of tools like this in place right now. They are still rather crude, but they do provide a simple model of how this technology may work. Many of you have probably heard of Vantage Learning and their product, MyAccess. MyAccess is a web based writing tool for students. Students write to a specific prompt using the web based application and when they are completed with their writing the web application will fire back suggestions for how they can improve their work. This web based application is able to make recommendations to students based on the thousands and thousands of other writing assignments written to this same particular writing prompt. It has stored what qualities a good essay possesses for this prompt, and the qualities of a poorly written essay. It is then able to compare the student’s writing to this huge database of writing samples, and can then provide the student with recommendations based on what is missing from their work.

So let’s take this up a notch. We have had the ability to map the human genome now for what seems like an eternity. The genome is essentially a map that describes all of our individual genes. Each individuals genome is unique. However, there are also many similarities in genome maps. Currently we have been using these similarities to identify things that we have found common among individuals, whether that is health related similarities or physical similarities. When we ge to the point of having databases consisting of thousands and thousands, say millions, of individual human genomes and the technology to compare, analyze them; we then have the ability to synthesize new information from these comparisons. This information can then be provided to individuals with likely scenarios for their futures based on their genomes.

Now take this genome information and compare it to data stored in other databases. What other data you ask, essentially everything about us that is not related to our genome? We are the culmination of our experiences. These experiences are all stored in databases. The key word being “databases,” plural. Everything you purchase is stored in a database. Evey thing you eat, whether it’s purchased at the grocery store (think of your grocery receipt) or at a restaurant (think of your credit card receipt) is stored (potentially) in a database. Every television show you watch, every movie you download, every trip to the doctor is all stored in a database some where. The people you talk to on your mobile, the people you text, the people you “follow,” are all stored in a database.

Your children’s information is also stored in databases. Their grades, their assignments, their awards, the books they check out from the library; it’s all stored in a database. The friends that they hang out with and communicate with, and the places they hang out can all potentially be stored in a database.

If we begin comparing an individual student’s databases with thousands of other student databases, could we not provide recommendations to the student, or the parent, for improving their well being (learning, health, etc.) in the same way a web based writing application makes suggestions for improving a student’s writing skills?

If you then throw in the advances in technology as it relates to I/O (input and output) of “computers,” you can begin to see a time when this synthesized data can be delivered to the individual at anytime and on any device. For example, Google last week introduced a technology on their upcoming Android platform that will allow the camera on a hardware device to track a persons iris and provide information to the individual based on the location of their iris. Imagine eating dinner with your child at a Chinese food restaurant surrounded by beautiful Chinese paintings. Each one of those paintings is actually a “computer” and the canvas is actually a digital display device. The “picture” could recognize you (based on data stored in a database) and your child as you eat dinner; and then almost simultaneously compare the databases for each of you, your friends, your child’s grades, and within a split second provide you with information along the lines of things to discuss at the dinner table to help your child’s slumping ancient civilizations history grade. This information would be provided to you confidentially on your mobile you have resting on the table by your plate. Or it could be displayed on the digital canvas of the Chinese print on the wall behind your son’s head, held private by the constant measurement of your iris as you look at the framed picture, angling of the message’s pixels so that they are only visible to your eyes. What kind of information? How about talking points based on your child’s teacher’s current and upcoming lesson plans in his history class. Or, maybe you have a business associate in another state that you converse with regularly through social media who is going to be taking a trip to Mexico and will be staying near ancient Mayan ruins.

The true power of technology is the data that is stored within it. Someone will come up with the algorithms to take advantage of disparate databases combining what makes us who we are and to our experiences, providing us with a map of possible “learning” suggestions that are constantly updated and modified. This technology will change how we learn, and how we think of school, and who we consider our teachers.

Shortchanging Learning

The last two days of professional development at times reminded me of when I was a kid and going to church every Sunday with my family. I remember many nice things about going to church, but at the same time, there were huge contradictions that left me struggling with questions of my faith. Our professional development over the two days have focused on the research of effective instructional design. Instruction that is designed with the focus squarely on the student and their learning. There were a lot of great ideas, such as emphasizing lessons that are designed to provide the student with a clear idea of the learning objective or learning goal; the use of graphic organizers to cement declarative knowledge; and tips for effectively using rubrics for student assessment and feedback. However, at times, especially when discussing the research on declarative knowledge, I found myself back in a church pew as a teenager, trying to decipher the logic behind what the priest was stating in his sermon.

Let me explain. For this particular workshop, the presenter had broken down instruction into two different categories, declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge in simple terms is knowledge based on facts, details, concepts, and principles. Procedural knowledge is knowledge based on processes or skills, for example, how you probably learned to do long division. During the workshop, one of my “church pew” moments came when the facilitator was providing an example of a strategy to help teach declarative new knowledge. The presenter asked us if we could name all thirteen of the original United States colonies. I had been taking notes on my iPad and I immediately typed out the question into Google and almost before she had the words out of her mouth, I had multiple listings of the correct answer in my browser. She proceeded to demonstrate the use of a mnemonic device and spent the next eight to ten minutes creating a whimsical story about a cow using the beginning word parts of each of the thirteen original colonies. Was her strategy successful? Sure. There were some who could remember the story, and then recite the state names. But that’s not my point. Some people could argue that having students memorizing a whimsically story in order for them to recite the first thirteen colonies is not very useful learning. But that’s not my point either. My point is that we are using a tool for learning that would have been useful for students in 1776. It worked then, and it still works today, but it’s completely outmoded by the technology that we as adults use day in and day out. Mnemonic devices are a tool for the memorization of facts, concepts, details, and principles. Technology, search engines, and the web are tools for learning declarative knowledge too. The technology tools are much more efficient tools than those such as mnemonic devices. How many times this week have you used a mnemonic device to remember something in your work? How may times have you used your computer to look something up in your work?

I am afraid if we use the example above and multiply that by everything we are required to teach students, we are wasting a ton of time. In terms of the end result, reciting the original thirteen colonies, whether you use a mnemonic device or a search engine, the end results are the same, with one exception. If you use the search engine you’ll have banked approximately nine minutes to teach something else. Communities that recognize this fact potentially have the ability to increase student learning exponentially just in the fact that they have more time for real learning. Real learning that focuses students on the “whys” and “how comes?” Learning that requires students to think, form opinions and test out their ideas and opinions on each other. Does it really matter that students can recite all thirteen original colonies, or is it more important for them to understand what those thirteen colonies stand for? If we continue to use outmoded tools, I’m afraid we will have no time for the learning that matters most, the “whys” and the “how comes.” What do you think?

(Creative Commons image courtesy of isforinsects on flickr.com)