Teaching With Technology in APS

I was on NHL.com recently and noticed that Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the NHL, had recently visited Ron Clark’s school in Atlanta.  Plenty of Promethean hardware in this story.  This is my kind of story because it has three of my favorite things in the world (Ron Clark, the NHL, and Promethean) all in one story!  Check it out here.

Here’s the story behind the “Did You Know” and “Did You Know 2.0″ videos you might have seen already. This ran in the Rocky Mountain News on October 10, 2007. The link is here. It all started just south of Denver at Arapahoe High School. It’s a neat story that really gets you thinking about the power of technology in today’s world. Another great example of all of this being about the information and not necessarily the technology. The technology obviously played a factor in making this get as big as it has gotten.

The presentations can be found pretty much everywhere, including below!

The original “Did You Know”

And the new “Did You Know 2.0″

As I’ve said before, my wife works in a nearby school district. We worked in the same district for 6 years prior to her move. I’ve loved being able to talk about the similarities and differences between the two. It leads to really cool conversations about what we do.

One of her instructional leaders recently mentioned that a big downfall for many educators is the amount of attention and energy that is invested into creating and manifesting “roadblocks and detours.” The more I listen and observe, the more I realize that she is totally right. They come up in so many of our meetings. It especially happens all of the time with technology. Administrators and teachers see a tool with all kinds of potential and power and the first thing they bring up is “What is someone steals it or breaks it?” or “My kids won’t be able to use this well.” Roadblocks and detours…

I do my best to make sure I set up conversations and professional development that limit this type of thinking and appreciate that I’m now more aware of this type of approach in our schools.

The term “that’s just good teaching” comes up a lot around my job. The way we usually use it is when we talk about the importance of technology and how it can impact student engagement and achievement. When you take technology out of the scenario it all goes back to effective teaching understandings and practices. Nothing can replace that, but technology can undoubtedly have a positive impact in the classroom. I’ve seen that happen a lot.

I got to talking to my wife about this aspect of what we, as district coaches, do. She is an ELA district coach for a neighboring school system. I asked her, “Do you find the more you train your teachers about ELA instruction the more things just naturally go to good teaching?” Then she left me pretty much speechless (she does this from time to time.) She replied, “I’m not going to assume that everyone knows and practices ‘good teaching’. If everyone knew what good teaching was, we’d see it much more often or all of the time in our schools.” I can always depend on my wife for bringing more reality to pretty much everything we discuss. As always, she is totally right.

There are so many factors, large and very small, that go into good teaching. If someone asked me, “What do you mean by that?” when I said it, I would be at a little loss for words. It’s actually kind of difficult to articulate, but I do know when I see it. I guess it’s my job to make sure it happens more often in schools. I’ll think twice before I use that term again in such a loose way. “It’s just good teaching” obviously deserves a little more respect than that…

There is a progam that is being used in one of our middle schools that is technology based. Many literacy skills are covered within the program. It differentiates all of the work for the kids and does its best to meet the students at their level. The interface even functions like an email system. The teacher can monitor student progress electronically and assign work where and when they see appropriate. We’ve seen a demo and loved the possibilities contained within what we saw. Our staff knew it could be powerful, that’s why we chose to pursue it as an option to be piloted in one of our schools. Our Director of Instructional Technology went and saw it in action recently and was curious as to what he saw and experienced.

There are certain things the kids can do, and are expected to do, each day when they log in to the program. They need to read an article (that is differentiated to the reading level of each student) and a few other tasks, depending on what expectations the teacher sets within the classroom. What our boss noticed was that kids barely skimmed over those minimal tasks that are designed to have a positive impact on their literacy skills. The articles were either not very interesting or were leveled wrong for the kids. The big point here is how the technology is being used in this particular classroom.

One of the points that makes technology so powerful is that it can’t do everything for you. It is not meant to replace teachers, it is made to enhance teaching and learning. How this program is being used in this class is a great example of someone assuming that everything will happen automatically when technology integration becomes a part of the classroom environment. Everything we do has way more to do with content and understandings than it does with technology. Why not print out some of the articles and have reading groups? Why not have the kids discuss some of the content they run across in the program? Nothing will ever replace effective teaching practice, not even technology. Maybe (and I’m really hoping) some of this was already happening in the classroom, I haven’t been there myself. My judgment of what was going on doesn’t really matter here. I’m just trying to use this experience as a way to get my point across.

There are many people that need help in realizing that technology won’t solve our achievement issues, but it has the potential to be able to support all students as well as help us in reaching our goal of closing achievement gaps between particular groups of students. The one constant that will surely support our district get where we’d like to be is people; that is for sure.