My Technology "Menu"

I have composed a "menu" of digital resources that I use/will use in my classroom.  It isn't exhaustive quite yet, but it's a good start.

This past several years I tried several different "Web 2.0" tools and even taught a session on using Web 2.0 tools at a conference this summer.  Last year I felt that I did too many different things and wound up leaving many of my students confused on what tool was to be used to do which part of each assignment.  This year I want to be consistent!  In my last grad class I ran in to the same problem as a student- I had to double and triple-check how I was supposed to turn in assignments.  Did I post them in Assignments? Messages? Chat room? Forums?  It definitely made me crazy at times.

My Big Campus is going to be my "Main Course" where everything will be located.  I plan to mirror much of it on my school website so that parents can have access easily.  The other main "dish" in my repertoire will be Discovery Education, since that will be where the bulk of our science content will be found.  Here's the rest:

Starters- these tools are used by students to find more information and explore the skills and content independently.  xtramath, ten marks, and Khan Academy give students more customized learning experiences, while Explore Learning (Gizmos) and BrainPop provide additional content but are the same for all students.  Wolfram Alpha is like the ultimate calculator.

Desserts- these tools help students present their learning in digital format.  Most of the tools revolve around podcasting, which I have dabbled in for the past two years and plan to emphasize even more this year.  Prezi is a great presentation software.  Honorable mention goes to Glogster which didn't quite make the cut.

Drinks- these tools go with everything; they are used by students to keep track of their learning.  Included is our Student Information System, Skyward, as well as our Homework listing online.

There will likely be more added to this list throughout the year, and I won't limit myself to just these tools, but I also don't want to overwhelm students with too many.  My experience has shown that it is often better to become "experts" at a small amount of tools instead of trying to learn a million of them.

Redefining Education

My grad class has asked this question: "Has technology redefined education?"

The answer is a no-brainer, and has always been true- YES!

Much of this stems from this article written in the New York Times last October.  The article more or less suggests that education doesn't need to be using technology because it works at the Waldorf school.    Malarky.  These students are children of highly-paid employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google.  These kids have DNA that helps them, as well as families who value education.  That's a great start to being successful.  It doesn't hurt that the staff at Waldorf features a majority of teachers who have spent time overseas and in other professions.  That experience makes them fascinating people that are interesting- great qualities for teachers.  Plus, the teachers "loop" with their students from Kindergarten through eighth grade!  I can tell you that the advantages of knowing your students that well and for so long are many.  It's not the lack of technology that makes this school better, it's clearly the people.

Back to the question.  Before the printing press, (this is a lot of history for me, I'm not much into the past) one would learn as an apprentice.  They would learn from working directly with the person doing the job they would one day be doing themselves.  A blacksmith's apprentice would learn all of the smithing techniques from the blacksmith, and once he was capable he would become a blacksmith.  After the printing press, this didn't change that much.  At least not at first.  Rich people could afford books (they were cheaper than handwritten books, but they weren't free or anything!) and there was a "Digital Divide."  Ok, a "Technology Divide", but it's not as fun to say.  So now some people learned from books, not necessarily people.  As the Industrial Revolution changed the way humans worked, it also changed education.  Too many kids were jobless!  (Seriously, child labor laws came to be and kids didn't need to work as much as before to help their families survive.)  Schools started giving basic educations to everyone!  Plus, they were kind enough to let everyone out during the summer so they could do the farming.  Twice, through books and then machines, education was redefined.  So what's happening now?

It's all about jobs.  We are well past apprentice jobs, which were really simple to train for.  It was a "sitting duck".  Now we are aiming at a "moving target."  According to a study last year, technology companies have employees with a median age of 36.  According to this study the first social networking site began in 1997, when the average technology employee was 21 years old and likely in college.  That means that even while they were in college, their jobs may have not existed!  Technology  is changing the work force so rapidly that we no longer know exactly what we are aiming for.

Technology has always redefined education.  We are now aiming at a moving target.

I should add (and I have to for my grad class :-) ) that we took notes collaboratively.  Here is the link to my group's notes.  Truthfully I didn't really dig the joint notes.  I felt much of it was redundant and notes are often strange to read when someone else wrote them.  We tend to write small fragments with little context and often only write what is new or unknown to us.  These tendencies make others' notes quite strange to read. 

 

The Digital Divide

Caution- profanity is in the following video (but the worst is bleeped out)



Oh Dennis Green, thank you for your entertaining rant.  I'll write a post sometime about anger, but this post is totally different.  I'm talking about the Digital Divide.  As I was growing up, technology was slowly becoming a mainstay in the classroom.  Somewhat like a snowball, it started small with a few pieces of equipment and now there are schools where every student has their own device.  That is progress, for sure.  But like most things in life, some people are being left out.

Like most social issues, the Digital Divide is complex and doesn't follow a set of rules.  It's not as simple as we make it out to be, but at the same time, it is.  The Divide is the haves versus the have nots. It's the Kardashian's against the Clampett's.  It's the Bears versus the Cardinals.  Dennis Green, in all his rage, makes a valid point- "They are who we thought they were!"  Intelligent people can write insightful articles on how there has been a "shift" in the digital divide, but I see right through it.  I read about it, and my classmates in my grad school class even talked about it (see here), but it's nothing new.  The beginnings of the Digital Divide were between socioeconomic groups.  Those with money had access to technology while those without money did not.  Experts are now trying to say that low socioeconomic groups have access, but they use it differently.  They have cell phones but they only use it for entertainment purposes.  So I say, "They are who we thought they were!"  Low socioeconomic students are still at a disadvantage when it comes to technology access.

Dennis Green says that his team let the Bears "off the hook", implying that their 23-3 lead with 1:47 to go in the third quarter was enough to beat the Bears, but the Cardinals faltered.  We have been throwing money at schools with low income students for years but have seen little change in the cycle of low socioeconomic students only obtaining low-end jobs.  We are like the Cardinals/Bears game right now.  Even though we throw money at it (the Cardinals had a new stadium, new quarterback, and the highest-paid running back of all time) but were still behind the Bears and their pedigree of winning.

The good news is that the Cardinals made it to the Super Bowl a few years later, once they had a change of leadership.  Perhaps a change in leadership is what we need?

The bad news is the Cardinals lost that Super Bowl (XLIII) to the Steelers, the franchise with the most Super Bowl wins.

The Digital Divide is what I thought it was- the haves versus the have-nots.

What's in a grade?

"What can I do to bring up my grade?" Students and parents frequently ask this question of me, and it bothers me all the way to my core. Why? Because my answer is routinely "turn in your missing assignments" or something similar when my answer should be "learn __________, ____________, & ___________." I can't shake the idea that students are being judged by whether they have done their work versus whether they have learned.

 So, what's in a grade? What does getting an "A" mean?

Standardized Testing - Did You Know?!?!

I must start by giving credit to Gerald W. Bracey's article "Put to the Test" for some of this info.

Before "Obamacare" there was a different kind of big-time legislation called No Child Left Behind. NCLB basically said that every student in the country would be at grade-level by 2014. As a realist, I scoffed at this idea. As an educator who knows about the tests that will be used to prove this, I knew it was impossible. See, test-makers won't let everyone pass- EVER!

Let me explain. There are two basic types of standardized tests: norm-referenced (NRT) and criterion-referenced (CRT). NRTs give results in percentiles and are compared to grade-level. These test scores are basically lined up against one another and ranked. CRT results are given as a numerical score with cut-offs at specific numbers that tell students if they pass or fail. These tests are compared to a total possible. If we were to use NRTs, no more than 50% of students would "pass" because test-makers compare scores to a "norm" so that scores are distributed widely. Since it is comparative to other scores, not everyone could be considered "at grade-level".

 I think (but have no data to verify) that most states use CRTs. ISTEP+, Indiana's high-stakes standardized test is criterion-referenced. Aside from arguments about whether or not tests truly show student knowledge and skill, let's look just at the test-making process. Each question is sampled to see if the results are "valid". Here is a list of reasons a question would get omitted:

• a high percentage of students get the answer right
• a high percentage of students get the answer wrong
• students who got most test questions right all missed the same question, but students who didn't perform well overall got it right.
• students who bombed the test got the same question right at a high rate

Basically, if most students get a question right, it is removed from the test. ISTEP+ is supposed to be based on the Indiana Academic Standards which are publicly available and used by teachers to plan curriculum. If teachers are teaching the same skills and concepts, a large majority of students will become skilled at those skills. By my understanding, these questions would then be removed from the test or changed so that more students miss it. That could be achieved by changing the distractors (the wrong answer choices) or the wording of the question. This sounds to me that if kids get good at something, test-makers will try to simply trick them into wrong answers so that the results from the tests are more widely distributed.

 This is the process behind tests that can determine if students can continue to the next grade or even graduate. Scores from these tests will be used to evaluate teachers.

The Natives Are Coming

I like to read.  In fact, I can't remember the last time I watched a sitcom-type of show on TV.  (I'm actually in negotiations with the Mrs. to cancel TV altogether.)  But I don't like books.  Well, it depends on what you think of when I say book.  I prefer my iPad.  It's within arm's reach most of the time, and can hold lots of "books", and it looks cool.  Plus, now that I'm in grad school I have found that highlighting and bookmarking within digital books helps tremendously.  I'm in a leadership group at church that is using a workbook and I'm annoyed every time I try to write in it.

I am the first of a new generation- NetGen is the term.  My generation is just now coming into the professional world, but occupies all of school populations.  Check this out:

Here's the problem-teachers aren't ready.  NetGen students want to create (not dioramas though).  These students want to share.  That's as simple as I can make it, and it couldn't be more complex for educators.  I work in a pretty tech-forward school corporation where every teacher is equipped with classroom projectors and document cameras and knows how to use email.  Unfortunately, kids don't really care unless it's their creation on the screen and they rarely check email.  Students want to make videos, blogs, animations, podcasts, websites, presentations, anything to get their point across.  And then they want to post it to Facebook, Twitter, or the like.  They want to show it to the class, their friends in other classes, other schools, and around the world.  Watch my video I created to depict the stark divide between students today and their teachers:

The Native
by: Mr.Smiley