Teaching With Technology in APS

I am an instructional technology coach, with the key word there being instructional.  I can help make otherwise boring and direct teaching lessons come alive through the use of various instructional technology tools which include, but aren’t limited to: interactive white boards, digital visualizers, laptop computers, LCD projectors, personal response devices, and web-based resources that we have district licenses for as well as the many that are available free of charge.  To people that don’t “get it”, I tell them I train teachers to use technology in their classrooms; for people that “get it”, I tell them I help teachers make classroom and school 2.0 possibilities a reality in their classrooms.

A colleague and I recently walked into an elementary school classroom and the kids asked, “Who are they?”  The teacher, without hesitation, responded, “They are the people who fix things!”  I can’t get a, “They’re here  to help make the Promethean board work better” or “They’re here to help maximize the powerful potential of instructional technology”?!?  That’s really all we are to some teachers and buildings, people who fix things.  Someday this will change, but until then, I’ll just need to hang on for the ride.  I guess, kind of like the potential with the use of all these great learning tools, it’s going to take a little while for people to realize that our department can do plenty more than just “fix things.”

Until they realize that, I’ll just fix things, and darn well.  Welcome to my world…

My boss showed this to me today, he found it on David Warlick’s blog, “2 Cents Worth.”

Another awesome video about today’s students…

I always enjoy browsing around the comments to the videos too. So many different perspectives. So many people blame the kids for what I judge as adult deficiencies. How long are we going to be able to use that excuse? Why do you think students would choose to be on Facebook rather than listen to their teacher during class? It’s pretty evident that some things that used to work well aren’t working in today’s classrooms with today’s kids. What changes need to be made? How can we approach this differently so more kids are successful in school and in life? How long are we going to stay with this design, approach, and belief set knowing that it’s failing so many of our kids?

And most importantly, how long can you continue to call yourself an educator (and call our schools schools) when so many of the kids aren’t learning or are not in the least bit interested in learning?

Please think about it… for the sake of your students.

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.

A conversation came up during a recent team meeting about how YouTube is being used in our district. The whole issue began with a video that was posted by a student from a local high school. It was video of a fight between two female students at a nearby park. Here is the video in question.

The background information of exactly what was going on is still being researched, but the impact on how we might use YouTube is already a main part of many conversations. I’ve even heard that there’s a possibility that YouTube would no longer be accessible on any district computer. My question is, is YouTube the real problem here?

If you look at everything from its most basic level, we have technologically literate students using technology in an inappropriate way. That’s it. These kids did something that, I’d say, the majority of their teachers don’t know how to do. They captured video, uploaded it onto a computer, edited it, and then uploaded it onto YouTube. These are a few of the many technology skills we wish that all of our learners (and teachers) in the 21st Century had. All we need to do now is harness that energy (and knowledge) and focus it in a more positive way.

Here are a couple of examples of what I’m referring to. These are water cycle projects that kids produced.

There is obviously, in my view, an issue in school culture as well. Is this the only thing kids get excited about in school? Is this the only thing having to do with their school that they’d watch on YouTube? Is this how they want their school, their district, and most importantly themselves represented to the world? That would be an interesting conversation to have with the students that were involved in this process in one way or another. I’d be curious to hear their responses and where the conversation went from there. It might be pretty powerful and definitely a teachable moment if it’s approached in a tactful, logical, and thoughtful way.

So, I hope, through one means or another, that our leadership figures out that the issue here isn’t as much about the technology as they’d like to think. A website that had over 60,000,000 visitors during the 2006 year is a powerful tool, whether they’d like to think so or not, and it’s inevitable that some choose people use it in an inappropriate and/or embarrassing way. That’s just part of so many people having access to it. But how many of those 60,000,000 visitors are using it in a powerful way? Think of the power this tool has and what our students and teachers would be losing if it was blocked. Is that what we want to do for our students? Is limiting their access to the site really going to solve the issue here?

We can learn a great lesson from this experience. There are plenty of technology skills to build upon in this situation. What can we do to make sure resources like YouTube are used in an appropriate way in the future? And will blocking it really solve the bigger problem behind this whole unfortunate posting? I guess we’ll need to wait and see.

…That’s just my two cents, for what it’s worth.

I ran across a few more articles that drive my point home about my previous “Why not yes? (Or at least maybe)” entry. It just seems to me that the trust we once had with kids and their integrity is quickly going away and I’m not sure if it has to do as much with the technology as everyone is saying. Is the technology really the issue here? Maybe taking that out of the discussion and having more of a focus on integrity, honesty, and responsible use of technology is what needs to be brought up. Again, the role of educators is changing so quickly, it’s hard to keep up. That’s for sure.

Here’s an article against technology in schools from the Arizona Republic…

And here is the reply from Ian Jukes’ blog.

Last Friday and co-worker and me were scheduled for “tech training” at one of our schools in the district. When we got there we got a list of teachers that had signed up for the extra support. There were about 10 that were going to come throughout the day. We came at 7:15, I ended up leaving at 11:00; we had seen one teacher. Randy stayed for the afternoon group, that was supposed to have five people there; one teacher showed up. We had an entire day scheduled and ended up seeing two teachers in six and a half hours. It was obviously not the best use of our time and expertise. As I get deeper into my new job, I notice that respecting someone’s time is a big deal. I know I’d like my time to be respected and I really do try to respect, and be aware of, the time of others that I work with as well.

Here’s what we learned (and what we had feared from when it was scheduled). The more details school leadership representatives can include for teachers on the front end, the more effective the training will be. Just getting us scheduled is not near enough to have effective support from our end. That’s a very small part of the process and has absolutely nothing having to do with technology.  Those are simple effective planning and teaching practices. The teachers had no idea what they signed up for and therefore didn’t view it as valuable. The leader we worked with sent a reminder email, just in passing, at the beginning of the day. It doesn’t need to be stated how well that worked.

Accountability was the other issue. If you signed up and blew us off, what were the consequences? There were obviously none. I’m going to follow up on that with the school so something like that doesn’t happen again there or at any other schools.

So the day wasn’t a complete waste. We learned our lesson and passed it on to our colleagues. We’ll do a better job in the future to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I’m not really bitter or upset, I’m disappointed the school and/or teachers didn’t seem to view our time as an opportunity to enhance their instruction.

Everything we do is, or at least should be, all about our students. So when you choose to look at it from that perspective, the kids ended up losing out, and that’s never a good thing; I don’t care what kind of spin you put on it.