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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.

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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.

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Inaugural Words: A Snapshot of History

Posted on January 19, 2009 by in Differentiation, Technology

The New York Times this week­end posted a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­ac­tive fea­ture at their web site: Inau­gural Words — 1789 to the Present. (Thanks, by the way, to Angela Maiers for point­ing me to this, via Larry Ferlazo’s blog.) The site gives a word cloud based on the inau­gu­ra­tion speeches of each president.

Here are a few ideas about how you could use this with your gifted students:

  • Select one of the speeches and have the stu­dents infer what­ever they can about the his­tor­i­cal con­text in which it was given.
  • Research the his­tor­i­cal period and compare/​contrast what was men­tioned in the speech with things that were left out.
  • Com­pare how vocab­u­lary has changed over time. Fig­ure out a way to illus­trate these changes (per­haps with a graph or timeline).
  • Com­bine the text from sev­eral speeches (per­haps all the speeches over a 50-​​year span, or all the speeches from the top-​​ranked Pres­i­dents) and cre­ate a Wor­dle to look for broader pat­terns of words.
  • Cre­ate a Wor­dle from Pres­i­dent Obama’s speech and com­pare it to those from other Pres­i­dents. (Thanks to Lee Kol­bert for this idea.)
  • Imag­ine you’re elected Pres­i­dent. Which other Pres­i­dents would you emu­late? Use words from their speeches to begin build­ing your own.
  • Research which Pres­i­dents wrote their own speeches and which used speech­writ­ers. Is there any dif­fer­ence in the vocabulary?

This is admit­tedly a very rough list of ideas, and none of these are fully fleshed-​​out lessons. What other thoughts do you have?

1000 Things That Matter

Posted on January 1, 2009 by in Differentiation, Technology

When I saw the site 1000 Things That Mat­ter this morn­ing, my first thought was about what I’d post there. I decided to give it a cou­ple of days and pon­der what really mat­ters before putting in my two cents.

Then I con­sid­ered how I might use this with my gifted stu­dents. The obvi­ous appli­ca­tion would be to have stu­dents write ideas they’d post there. Noth­ing wrong with that, of course, and I could even have the stu­dents post their ideas to the site. But I want to stretch my gifted stu­dents, and I’m sure that if I just put this ques­tion to them as is, they’d choose the first things that came to their minds. I’d rather take them into higher lev­els of analy­sis and evaluation.

One of the inter­est­ing things about the site is that the things peo­ple are shar­ing are avail­able as they are posted. I think it would be rather enlight­en­ing to have stu­dents do a 3-​​phase process with this site:

  1. First, answer the ques­tion indi­vid­u­ally: If you had to tell what mat­ters to you in two sen­tences, what would you say?
  2. Then, look at a sam­pling (or per­haps all) of the ideas that have been shared already. Con­sider some of these questions:
    • What do you notice?
    • Are there any patterns?
    • Are there any com­mon themes that keep com­ing back?
    • Is there any­thing that seems to be missing?
    • Is there any­thing surprising?
    • What can you tell me about the peo­ple who are sub­mit­ting their ideas?
  3. Now look at what you wrote orig­i­nally. Would you change it? How? Why?

I encour­age you to try this process your­self and con­tribute a com­ment to the site. I’d also be inter­ested in what other ideas you have for using 1000 Things That Mat­ter with stu­dents. Share your ideas here in the comments.

Gifted Thinker, Meager Writer

Posted on December 2, 2008 by in Technology

Caught in the Fence, by Neal Sanche

Caught in the Fence, by Neal Sanche

In con­ver­sa­tions with sev­eral teach­ers this week I have observed the same scene repeated. They have highly ver­bal gifted stu­dents in their class­rooms who, when asked to write, pro­duce min­i­mal out­put. Their first draft is often their only draft, and the process seems excruciating.

We spec­u­late (admit­tedly with­out any direct evi­dence or research) that for these stu­dents, the mechan­ics of writ­ing get in the way, slow­ing down the process to the point that the student’s thoughts race ahead of the pen­cil. In fear of los­ing the ideas that flow so read­ily, the stu­dents give up rather than try to keep up.

With some exper­i­men­ta­tion, we have cre­ated an approach which seems to be work­ing well to get these stu­dents putting out writ­ten work which matches their ver­bal abil­i­ties. We have installed Audac­ity, a free open-​​source sound record­ing and edit­ing pro­gram, onto sev­eral class­room com­put­ers. The stu­dents have the option for each assign­ment to begin the writ­ing process ver­bally instead of on paper. They sim­ply record what they want to say, save the file, then later can go back and tran­scribe their words onto paper or into a word processor.

The results have been won­der­ful. Even some stu­dents who didn’t seem to have par­tic­u­larly strong ver­bal skills have asked to use the pro­gram and are pro­duc­ing some of their best work this way. Teach­ers have caught me in the hall­way or pulled me aside in the class­room to tell me excit­edly that they are see­ing great results already, and that stu­dents who were for­merly reluc­tant to write are now eager to get to their next writ­ing project.

The exper­i­ment is still in fairly early stages, and I’m sure we will run into glitches along the way, but so far, it seems to be a win-​​win!

Moving Beyond Paper

Posted on November 4, 2008 by in Technology

In his blog, Scott McLeod recently reported on a keynote address by Alan Novem­ber. Here are a few high­lights that are rel­e­vant to how we edu­cate gifted stu­dents in the 21st cen­tury:

There is a gap between what we teach chil­dren and what is needed in the global work­place, and the gap is growing.

Stu­dents need to be able to do three key things:

  • Have the capac­ity to do good research on the Web
  • Have good global com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills
  • Be self-​​directed


One of the goals of gifted edu­ca­tion is to help stu­dents with great poten­tial ful­fill it. I believe it would be irre­spon­si­ble not to con­sider the impact that these chil­dren can have on our soci­ety and our world as adults, and to pre­pare them to be global citizens.

Scott also notes later in his post that in order to have global com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills, stu­dents need a big voice. How do we give them that voice? Move beyond paper. “Paper gives you a lit­tle voice—paper stays in the class­room,” he says. Teach stu­dents how to develop their voice online. Cre­ate blogs, web sites, wikis, and shared documents.

A telling point was made by Alan Novem­ber in his keynote: “Too many ‘technology-​​enabled’ assign­ments involve using the com­puter as a $1,000 pen­cil.” Are we sim­ply mov­ing our paper to a file on the local hard drive or school net­work? We need to teach our stu­dents to use the real life tech­nol­ogy tools they will need in the work­place. We need to lever­age the tools they are going to use any­way in their free time (Face­book and YouTube) for aca­d­e­mic goals. How much more pow­er­ful will an assign­ment be when the world is the audi­ence instead of just the teacher?

A student’s port­fo­lio should not be a folder in a file cab­i­net some­where that will never be seen again after June. What if a student’s port­fo­lio began with the list gen­er­ated when her name is typed into Google? Will Richard­son calls this her dig­i­tal foot­print.

Here’s the thing: Our stu­dents are going to have these dig­i­tal foot­prints whether we embrace the idea or not. As an edu­ca­tor, I’d rather be help­ing them choose the path those foot­prints are going to fol­low, and to guide them away from the pot­holes and dead ends that lie ahead.