Archive | July, 2009

Lessons in Responsibility from Spider-Man, Part 2

Posted on July 10, 2009 by in Technology

Child's Garden Tool
Image by Fire Engine Red via Flickr

Yes­ter­day, I began a series of blog posts about the respon­si­bil­ity that comes along with the use of pow­er­ful tech­nol­ogy tools in school. We can­not hand stu­dents the keys to the Inter­net with­out some dis­cus­sion of the ethics and respon­si­bil­i­ties of dri­ving on the Superhighway.

But stu­dents aren’t the only ones in this dis­cus­sion that have respon­si­bil­i­ties. Teach­ers also must under­stand their role in the process—and I’m not just talk­ing about their respon­si­bil­ity to teach respon­si­bil­ity to their stu­dents. Teach­ers have three main areas of respon­si­bil­ity of their own when using instruc­tional tools in the classroom.

Learn the Tools

Long before a teacher can pos­si­bly use a tool to teach, she must first be a stu­dent. This has been true as long as there have been tech­no­log­i­cal advances in edu­ca­tion. When chalk­boards were first intro­duced to schools, teach­ers responded much like they do now to mod­ern tech tools.

Black-​​boards are not uncom­mon, but are lit­tle resorted to by the teacher. This would be the case with most of the school appa­ra­tus which is thought indis­pens­able.… Most teach­ers, with their present qual­i­fi­ca­tions, would not under­stand their use­ful appli­ca­tions. (Barnard, 1839, p. 5)

The impor­tance of the black board as an instru­ment of instruction…has been insisted on in every peri­od­i­cal on edu­ca­tion which I have seen.… In many of our com­mon schools, how­ever, it has been but barely intro­duced. The teacher knows almost as lit­tle how to use it as his pupils. (Alcott, 1843, p. 170)


That sec­ond quote comes from a book of instruc­tion for teach­ers about how to use a chalk­board, includ­ing step-​​by-​​step tuto­ri­als. Today, of course, the chalk­board (or white board) is such an inte­gral part of what we do we don’t even give it a sec­ond thought. Instruc­tion in its use is no longer necessary.

This is not true with more recent tech­nol­ogy. Unlike the chalk­board, today’s teach­ers did not grow up in a cul­ture where com­put­ers and the Inter­net were an inte­gral part of daily life and school. Thus, we need to first become learn­ers and under­stand the tech­nol­ogy our­selves. This may mean tak­ing work­shops and sem­i­nars (more on this in my next post), read­ing books and arti­cles, or just jump­ing in and fid­dling, but it will not hap­pen on its own, and it will not hap­pen by osmosis.

I read a blog post yes­ter­day which gives a great expla­na­tion of the impor­tance of this mind­set, and which also leads right into the next responsibility:

Use the Tools

Many times teach­ers attempt to leap directly from a basic famil­iar­ity with a new tool into using it in instruc­tion. I’m cer­tainly guilty of this myself, par­tic­u­larly if the tool is one that intrigues me and is full of pos­si­bil­i­ties. In my expe­ri­ence, though, this usu­ally leads quickly to either mis­er­able fail­ure or at best a super­fi­cial layer awk­wardly tacked on to exist­ing instruction.

There is a cru­cial step miss­ing: teach­ers must first use the tool them­selves for their own learn­ing, pro­fes­sional or oth­er­wise. Until you inte­grate some­thing this deep and pow­er­ful into your own learn­ing process on some level, you can’t com­pre­hend how a stu­dent will inter­act with it. This is not a new idea, but it is one that does not yet per­vade the pro­fes­sion, and until it does, new tech­nol­ogy will be thought of as a fad or an add-on—or worse, a sub­sti­tute for “real” instruction.

We have to con­tinue to remind our­selves that these are not new sub­jects to be taught, they are sim­ply new tools. Would you trust a fly­ing instruc­tor who could pass a writ­ten test about pilot­ing but had never flown an air­plane? Why, then, do we think we can teach stu­dents about blog­ging if we aren’t blog­gers ourselves?

Design Quality Learning Experiences

This is (and should be) the hard­est part of teach­ing, and one which con­sumes the largest amount of energy and time. If done well, it will be like the Parthenon: the struc­ture you and your stu­dents build together will hold up for a very long time. If done poorly, it will be more like a movie set: it looks great from one side, but has lit­tle sub­stance and less endurance.

Yes­ter­day I dis­cussed the stu­dents’ respon­si­bil­i­ties in using tech­nol­ogy and the impor­tance of teach­ing them. Many objec­tions to tech­nol­ogy use revolve around keep­ing the stu­dents from “fool­ing around” dur­ing class. Let them blog, and they might write about some­thing inap­pro­pri­ate. Let them have cell phones and they might text the test answers to each other. Let them use a wiki and they might get out­side help on their assign­ment. (All of this hap­pened before there was tech­nol­ogy, of course, but let’s just give the argu­ment the ben­e­fit of the doubt for the moment.)

I sus­pect that beneath these objec­tions is fear: fear of los­ing con­trol of the class­room and fear that the lost con­trol will reveal inad­e­quate and inef­fec­tive teach­ing meth­ods that are more eas­ily hid­den in a teacher-​​centered, tra­di­tional structure.

Thus, the prob­lem isn’t the tech­nol­ogy, it’s the teacher. Know the lim­i­ta­tions and pit­falls inher­ent in the tools and plan for them. If they might get out­side help because they can access the wiki any time, then build that into the assign­ment. Encour­age it, even. Make it essen­tial to the task. That’s more real­is­tic any­way. Of course cre­at­ing assign­ments like that is more com­pli­cated. It takes thought, energy, and time. But truth­fully, it is thought energy and time that we should be putting into our instruc­tion even if it does not involve new tools.

To para­phrase Haim Ginott, we must col­lec­tively rec­og­nize the fright­en­ing con­clu­sion that we are the deci­sive ele­ment in our class­rooms, and the respon­si­bil­ity is ours to see that the cli­mate and the learn­ing envi­ron­ment allow our stu­dents to thrive.

Ref­er­ences

Barnard, H. (1839).First annual report of the Sec­re­tary of the Board. &printsec=titlepage&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0" target="_blank">Con­necti­cut Com­mon School Jour­nal, 1, 155–176.

Alcott, W. A. (1843). &printsec=titlepage&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0" target="_blank">Slate and black board exer­cises. New York: Mark H. Newman.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Lessons in Responsibility From Spider-Man, Part 1

Posted on July 9, 2009 by in Technology

Fictional history of Spider-Man
Image via Wikipedia

“With great power there must also come—great respon­si­bil­ity.” (Stan Lee)

“When some­one has been given much, much will be required in return; and when some­one has been entrusted with much, even more will be required.” (&version=51;" target="_blank">Luke 12:48, New Liv­ing Translation)


Grow­ing up, my favorite super hero was Spider-​​Man. I could relate to him. Peter Parker was a lot like me, super pow­ers notwith­stand­ing. He was a lonely nerd, awk­ward around other peo­ple (espe­cially girls). Then he was handed incred­i­ble power and learned—the hard way—that no gift is free. It comes with the respon­si­bil­ity to use it well; the greater the power of the gift, the broader the scope of that responsibility.

I had a brief but inter­est­ing Twit­ter con­ver­sa­tion last night with Steven Ander­son (@web20classroom) about the lay­ers of respon­si­bil­ity involved when stu­dents use tools like Twit­ter in the class­room. The dis­cus­sion was prompted by this blog post by Jim Gates, who says, essen­tially, that allow­ing stu­dents to use Twit­ter in the class­room is a waste because they wouldn’t use it for any­thing pro­duc­tive. A num­ber of ideas came up in my con­ver­sa­tion with Mr. Ander­son which I will explore here over the next few days.

Like Mr. Gates’s post, many of the reac­tions I hear about using tools like Twit­ter, blogs, or wikis in the class­room are ini­tially about fear: pri­mar­ily fear that stu­dents will abuse them. Are these fears legit­i­mate? Cer­tainly. There is a long his­tory of stu­dents mis­be­hav­ing in school, and that won’t be any dif­fer­ent with new meth­ods and tools.

What we must rec­og­nize is that these new tech­nolo­gies are just that: tools. They don’t have an inher­ent value–they only have a func­tion. The value comes from how the tool is used. A pen was used by Shake­speare to write son­nets…and by Hitler to write Mein Kampf. A ham­mer was used by car­pen­ters to build the bell tower on Inde­pen­dence Hall…and by Roman sol­diers to cru­cify Christ. We must judge not the imple­ment but the intention.

Some may think that bring­ing these tools into the class­room is like hand­ing stu­dents a loaded gun, and thus the response is either to ban the guns from the school alto­gether, or to allow strictly con­trolled access with close super­vi­sion and mul­ti­ple lay­ers of secu­rity. The flaw in this rea­son­ing of course is that the func­tion of the gun is explic­itly to cause harm to another person—it is not a tool, but a weapon.

Oth­ers argue that it is the stu­dents who are inher­ently prone to choos­ing wrong. I often hear this from teach­ers in my school, either directly or by impli­ca­tion. This may be, but lim­it­ing their access to the tools won’t elim­i­nate this propen­sity. Instead, we need to edu­cate. Teach stu­dents about the pos­si­bil­i­ties and the pit­falls. Give them free­dom within bound­aries, and let them know both the rewards that come from respon­si­ble use, and the con­se­quences (nat­ural and imposed) that can come from poor choices. I believe, though, that stu­dents aren’t by nature bad, sim­ply unwise. And the wis­dom they will need as adults to han­dle the ubiq­ui­tous tech­nol­ogy they will encounter can­not come by shel­ter­ing them from that tech­nol­ogy as students.

Wis­dom only comes through expe­ri­ence. Peter Parker learned about this when he declined to use his power to stop a bur­glar: he felt it wasn’t his prob­lem. That bur­glar later killed his own uncle, and Peter real­ized he had a choice to make—use his gifts to help oth­ers, or be self­ish and allow lives to be destroyed. The tools avail­able to stu­dents today are far more pow­er­ful than pen­cil and paper, both to build and to destroy. A note degrad­ing some­one else might be seen by a few peo­ple and can be destroyed before it spreads too far. A blog post degrad­ing some­one else might poten­tially be seen by mil­lions, and can never be com­pletely eliminated.

The thing is, we can do noth­ing to pre­vent our stu­dents from learn­ing about and hav­ing access to these tools. All things con­sid­ered, isn’t it bet­ter that they learn about them in the safe, struc­tured envi­ron­ment of the classroom?

Stu­dents may or may not learn respon­si­bil­ity on their own. As edu­ca­tors we also have a respon­si­bil­ity, how­ever, and it is this respon­si­bil­ity I will explore more tomorrow.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

The One-Question Pretest

Posted on July 1, 2009 by in Differentiation, Policy

Birdhouse...
Image by Јerry via Flickr

Yes­ter­day I shared some thoughts about pretest­ing that were prompted by a year-​​old post by Scott McCleod. Today, I came across another year-​​old blog post, this time by Angela Meiers. In this arti­cle, she talks about how com­pre­hen­sion is not some­thing that can be con­tained in a dis­crete list of facts and skills, but rather it is an ongo­ing, recur­sive process of apply­ing those facts and skills to build a pic­ture of the world.

It occurs to me that what we often do in school is some­thing like hand­ing the stu­dents a bird­house kit. The pieces are pre-​​measured and pre-​​cut, and every­thing we need is already there. We walk them all step-​​by-​​step through the assem­bly of the kit, focus­ing on their tech­nique in ham­mer­ing and glu­ing. It doesn’t mat­ter that some of the kids have designed and built their own bird­houses, and oth­ers haven’t ever seen a bird before. At the end of the les­son, every­one in the class has an iden­ti­cal birdhouse–though per­haps we allow them to choose their own col­ors for the paint.

Rather than giv­ing a pretest that runs through all of the dis­crete skills in a unit (“explain how to ham­mer a nail with­out bend­ing it”, “which goes on first, the roof or the base?”), con­sider giv­ing your stu­dents a one-​​question pretest that gets at the most impor­tant aspects of the unit you are going to teach: “Draw a design for a bird­house and explain how you would build it.” Here are some sam­ple One-​​Question Pretests that might work in var­i­ous sub­ject areas:

  • Explain how Amer­ica became an inde­pen­dent country
  • Pret­zels come in bags of 24 and you want to give one to each of the 473 stu­dents in our school. Fig­ure out how many bags we need to buy and show how you com­puted the answer with­out a calculator.
  • Where do new plants come from, and how do they grow?
  • Tell me what grade you should get for this class, and write a para­graph that con­vinces me you’ve earned it.
  • Read the begin­ning of this story and write what you think will hap­pen next. Explain why you think so.

While you wouldn’t get dis­crete data on what spe­cific skills and knowl­edge your stu­dents have, a care­ful read­ing and analy­sis of the stu­dents’ responses can give you a wealth of infor­ma­tion that would be immensely help­ful in plan­ning your instruc­tion. It wouldn’t take any more time than a tra­di­tional pretest. If you embed it into other activ­i­ties, such as includ­ing the pretest as a learn­ing cen­ter activ­ity that all stu­dents will com­plete over the course of a week dur­ing nor­mal rota­tions, it might even take less time.

How can you apply the One-​​Question Pretest idea to your own sub­ject and grade level?

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]