Push Me, Pull Me
It’s an interesting sign of how this connected world we live in actually works when I see people coming back to revisit an idea that was floated months earlier, still mulling it over and willing to come back and re-clarify things again in their own head, which in turn helps others (like me) to re-clarify things in mine. I'm referring to a post called Unlearning, Relearning, Learning by Graham Wegner, who was in turn responding to an earlier post written on this blog back in May this year.
The conversation had basically turned to the idea of how people learn. Graham referred to another post from Dean Groom, where Dean talked about the idea of people being able to learn on demand, when they need it, by accessing the wealth of available online resources that are scattered across the Internet, produced by the millions of members of the online community. This mass-sharing has produced what Dean referred to as "the scattered manual", where the instructions for doing pretty much anything can be found and reassembled in order to learn, if only you have the skills to do so. I hadn’t heard that idea of the “scattered manual” before, but I really like it because that’s pretty much exactly what it is… a collective knowledge of many people scattered right across the network. When one has the skills and ability to decode, reassemble, aggregate the parts of the “manual”, then that elusive “independent learning” becomes a real possibility for anyone who wants (and knows how) to get it.
I think there are two very different and distinct aspects of learning something… one is obviously the learning, and that seems to be a “pull” activity initiated by the learner. Learners need to assume responsibility to pull information to themselves when they feel they need it.
The other aspect is teaching, and that seems more like a “push” activity, where information is pushed towards the learner, usually by a “teacher”, or someone who already has the knowledge, skills or understandings that the learner does not yet have.
As much as we talk about reinventing education by doing away with “teaching” in favour of “learning” (usually as a reaction against the industrial model of education where teachers taught and students were supposed to just absorb it, and in doing so restore learning to its rightful place) I think we need to be careful that we don’t push the pendulum too far the other way and marginalise the act of teaching altogether.
My feeling is that good teachers know when to actively teach, and when to allow students to independently learn. Good teachers know when to push and when to allow pull. They know when to say to a student “this is how you do it”, versus saying “you need to go away and think about this for yourself”. It’s not that Teaching should take precedence over Learning, or that Learning is somehow less tainted with the stink of the 20th Century than Teaching, but rather, we need to know where the balance point is, in various situations, for different students, and apply that balance dynamically so that every student is always right there on the edge of their Zone of Proximal Development. A learner's reach should always exceed their grasp, but only by the appropriate amount, and perhaps the teacher's role is to keep that gap at the appropriate amount.
As a teacher, I want to have the wisdom to know when to say to my learners (including when these learners happen to be other adults), “You seem to be struggling, let me help you”, and conversely when to say “I will not do this for you, as it only deprives you of the opportunity to learn it for yourself.”
I don’t think you should ever do for someone what they can and should be able to do for themselves. The “scattered manual” exists so readily that to deprive learners from the opportunity, and in doing so absolve them from the responsibility, to learn for themselves just shortchanges everybody in the long run.
Popularity: 18% [?]
You Don’t Have To Like It
I just read a post on a mailing list where the topic touched on teachers that struggle with technology. The phrase that really got me going was something about making allowances for teachers who don't like or understand technology (whether they are new grads or close to retirement) and how this is all a bit hard for them. This is something I feel really passionate about so I have to say it...
Technology in schools is NOT a new thing.
I just cannot accept excuses about technology being optional, whether it's from someone who is new to teaching or others who are close to retirement. There are children in those classrooms every day who deserve the best education we can offer them, and it is completely unfair if that education is less than it should be because someone wants to pick and choose which aspects of their job they feel are important. No child should have to put up with out of date learning experience just because their close-to-retirement teacher is "taxiing to the hangar".
Computers started appearing in classrooms back when I was still at teachers college more than 25 years ago. There has been an expectation from EVERY school, school system and government policy that I've worked under in the past 20 years to embed and integrate technology into the education process. Using technology in the learning process, and having some understanding of it and what it enables our students to do, is NOT something that was dreamed up in the last few months, or that appeared suddenly with the DER/BER/<insert acronomyn here>.
I'm so tired of having the integration of technology into learning overlooked because it's "too hard". As educators - actual professional educators, who actually go into classrooms every day and teach for a living - we do NOT have the luxury of choosing whether we should be integrating technology, or whether we want to learn more about it, or whether we think it's relevant to the learning process. It is, it's part of the job and if people don't think so, then they ought to be getting a copy of the Saturday paper and looking for a something else to do where they CAN be selective about what part of the job they are willing to take seriously without it impacting on our future generations.
Your government, your state, your diocese, your school system, your school, have all been mandating this technology integration requirement for at least 20 years that I'm aware of. Every school I've ever worked for has dedicated many hours and dollars to providing professional development, training, resources and equipment to make it happen. The fact that we are STILL having this conversation about teaching professionals who are not up to speed with this stuff after all this time is downright embarrassing to the profession.
It makes me crazy when I hear people talking about using technology in the classroom as being "hard", as though it's also optional. Every job has hard bits, but if they are part of the job, you just learn to do them.
You don't have to like it, you just have to do it.
Popularity: 85% [?]
Tiny Bursts of Learning
Despite the fact that I know many teachers who would rank Twitter as the most valuable and powerful networking tool they have access to, there are still many more who simply don't "get" the value of Twitter. I've been to lots of conferences over the last few years where the enormous value of belonging to a Personal Learning Network was being touted, and Twitter is nearly always being suggested as the ideal tool for building that network. At one recent conference I asked for a show of hands for who was not yet on Twitter, and many hands went up... my response was "Why not? What are you waiting for? How many times do you need to hear people say that Twitter is the most valuable tool they have, before you actually try it for yourself?"
I spoke to a group of preservice teachers recently who were basically told by their lecturers that they needed to join Twitter. Despite the fact that it was being promoted to them as a powerful way to learn and network with others, most of them seemed to join up simply because it was part of their assessment requirement. Because they joined Twitter "under duress", I don't expect them to actually buy into it, use it well, or continue to use it past the mandated requirement to use it. And that's a bit of a shame.
In contrast to all this is the general sentiment among many teachers that "we need more PD!", or the always-amusing "How can they expect us to learn new things if all we get is a few PD days a year?"
If you still believe that professional development is what happens on those two or three days each year when you sit in a classroom and have some expert "deliver" it to you, I have bad news. That model is no longer sustainable and the days of PD as something that is done "to you" by "experts" a couple of times a year are over.
Learning needs to be ongoing. The world is changing. There are new tools that can help students learn, new ideas about learning, new brain research, new emerging technologies, new social structures, and so on... to think that you can maintain a professional outlook by attending two or three PD workshops a year is almost laughable. To keep up with new learning, you really need to be plugged in to an ongoing source of professional discourse and resource sharing. It needs to be something that happens regularly, at least several times a week. Like so many other aspects of the 21st Century, some of the "ways we've always done things" don't really cut it anymore.
So how can something at simple as Twitter possibly be used to stay professionally current?
How I use my Twitter PLN to learn
I've been keeping an eye on my Twitter stream for the past 10 minutes or so. Using the Twitter app for Mac, it sits in a narrow vertical window on the right side of my screen and as the people I follow add their tweets they flow by in a steady stream that updates every few moments. How fast this flow happens is obviously dependent on how many people you follow... I follow about 2600 people, so it tends to be a pretty steady stream of tweets, but yours might be more or less. Occasionally I glance at this "stream of (networked) consciousness" and spot little gems that look interesting.
For example in the last ten minutes I've spotted the following things...
- A great quote about writing from Bud Hunt
- A link to a promising new open source 3D animation tool
- A good article on landing your dream job in a networked world
- An interesting question about URLs posed by Jim MacMillan
- News about Twitter's new advanced search features
- A link to a thought provoking article about game based learning
- A great teaching idea from Penny Coutas about using Xtranormal for language learning
- An link to interesting article about the relevance of the social sciences
- A student work sample of an excellent global collaborative project
- A link to a list of the top 10 lazy email habits
- A link to an article about the effectiveness of online learning for young students
- A link from Alec Couros to a 5 minute video called "Cultural Differences"
- A fascinating article about Facebook scams
...to name but a few.
In the same 10 minutes worth of tweets, I also responded to a couple of questions from other people that I felt I could help them with, saw a funny story about Moodle, watched an amusing exchange between some people I know, and ended up getting invited into an Elluminate session about developing Moodle courseware.
Just ten minutes. Even just skimming through that list of things would give me more relevant PD than most teachers get exposed to in a whole year. And those of us who use Twitter in this way are able to tap this stream of information any time we like.
(I hope you also noticed that I still don't know what Ashton Kutcher had for lunch, or what crazy antics Charlie Sheen is up to. I don't care about that stuff, so I don't follow those people, so I don't see those tweets. Twitter works because you get to make choices about who is part of your network. You create relevance for yourself.)
Now, before you assume that I spend my whole day getting sidetracked by Twitter, let me assure you that's not the case. I'm telling you about this 10 minute slice of time to make the point that Twitter, when you build a network of relevant people, is an amazingly rich sources of ideas, inspiration and connections.
I don't read every tweet. I don't follow every link. I let most of the tweetstream just flow by me, only dipping into it if I get a moment. If I spot something interesting I hit the star to favorite it and come back to it later. If anything really good turns up in the stream and I miss it, it gets retweeted over and over so the chance of me seeing it is still pretty good. But mostly it's just there, flowing by, ready for me to dip into it and pull out a few gems whenever i have a moment. Do that every day and pretty soon you have a substantial body of PD building up.
I understand why people find it hard to get their head around Twitter. I understand why people are still skeptical when they hear others say things like "Twitter is the best PD you can get!" It sounds like complete hyperbole... How on earth can a random collection of short messages from strangers possibly compete with professionally organised training and PD sessions?
It competes because it's more relevant, more timely, ongoing, interactive, daily and personal. Traditional PD just can't offer all that.
If you're one of those people who resist Twitter because it just doesn't seem logical, please just suspend your doubt and give it a go. Don't just join and do nothing; give it a proper go. Follow a bunch of relevant people - at least 50 or 60 - get a decent Twitter client, and open yourself to the possibilities of what a network offers. You won't regret it.
Popularity: 100% [?]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:04 — 7.0MB)
The Right Direction
As a technology integration specialist my job is to help other teachers learn more about technology, but the real spillover is that I get to help other teachers to learn more about all sorts of stuff. Because of this I've come to a much better understanding of what it means to be a lifelong learner, to find true joy in learning for learning's sake, and to be curious about pretty much everything. I love learning, and I find it difficult to understand why others sometimes appear not to.
Many schools espouse the values of lifelong learning, but not all have teachers who live those values on a daily basis. We have a new principal in our school this year, and like all management changes it often comes with a great deal of conjecture about what might change, what new ideas will be put in place. Over the last few weeks I've been able to get an insight into our new boss and what's important to him, and to get a feel for where our school might be heading over the next few years. And for many reasons, I'm excited about it.
In particular, I was pleased to discover that I'm working for a guy who openly states that...
- Learning to be a teacher is like all learning: it doesn’t occur in an easy linear fashion. All of us are in the business of continual improvement.
- Teachers are responsible to take charge of their professional learning.
You'd think that such statements are obvious, but so few leaders will actually say it. What a breath of fresh air.
Popularity: 13% [?]
Finding the Right Model for ICT PD
I guess many readers of this blog would know that I work as an ICT Integrator at a large independent girls' school in Sydney. Large chunks of my day are spent working with our teachers and our students to help them understand a little more about technology and how it might be used to make teaching and learning more engaging and effective. Of course, teachers always seem to be very busy, and one of the difficulties in trying to deliver some form of ongoing PD is simply getting them to find the time to do so. I've tried a number of different models for delivering PD; some work quite well, others not so much. It usually comes down to finding time, and making it meaningful.
In case it's of any use to you, I thought I'd share an email that I sent to all the teachers in our junior school (R-6) yesterday. It's an outline of how I plan to be delivering ICT professional development to them next term. I've found that this model seems to work best for our staff, and it seems to give the most effective results. I think this is because it's delivered in a real situation that is authentic to them and also places a good deal of responsibility onto the staff to embrace the use of ICTs for themselves. (one of my beliefs is that you should never do for somebody what they can, and should, be able to do for themselves) Perhaps most importantly, our teachers seem to like this PD model and they seem quite enthusiastic about what we're doing together... so this is what I said to them...
Dear teachers,
Although the focus of what I do here at PLC is technology integration, it has always worked so much better when you allow me to help you link this technology integration directly into the things you plan to teach as part of your day to day activities... in this way, the use of technology can richly support and extend the learning for the students. Over the past couple of years I feel that we have all worked together to make technology less of an “add-on” to the curriculum, and it has become more of an embedded tool for helping engage and enrich our students. Together, some of the techniques and strategies we have tried in the Junior School over the past few years includes podcasting, blogging, live webcasting, digital mapping, digital storytelling, web 2.0 tools, video news reports, social networking, manipulating digital images, and so on. In the process, your students have come into contact with a wide range of technology tools that are an increasingly important part of the world in which they live.
In working with the Junior School staff, I have tried a number of different models for providing professional development in these tools, from offering before and after school workshops, holding lunchtime sharing sessions, shared planning time, and so on. With the incredibly hectic schedules that most of you have, some of these PD models have been more successful than others.
Starting in Semester 2, all staff will be required to undertake specific ICT professional development each semester. In the Junior School, we all agree that the best way to deliver this PD to you is in your actual classroom situation.
The most successful PD model for our teachers seems to be when we create time for collaborative planning time with the ICT Integrator. Under this PD model, I meet with each year group three times per term in order to plan and facilitate the integration of ICT into a classroom project. We meet early in the term to plan a unit of work together, meet again midterm to monitor the progress of that work, and again at the end to evaluate and assess the work. Of course, if you need extra assistance with delivering an ICT project then I am more than happy to come into your classes and assist, or to help out with computer class time, but I feel that the core of my ICT integration support is best done by assisting you to develop the skills and knowledge you need to deliver your own classwork with a rich ICT component. The recent Year 2 “Great Inventions” project is a good example of how I see this working.
Starting in Term 3, we will resume this PD planning model that we’ve used before as it seems to prove the most successful with Junior School teachers. After looking at the Junior School timetable, I’ve listed some suggested dates below that we could use for meetings in weeks 2B, 5A and 8B of next term. These all take advantage of times when specialist teachers have your students. Please take a look and let me know ASAP if there are problems with any of these dates and offer some alternate dates that are more suitable for you in these weeks.
(I've removed the actual dates listed here, as they aren't relevant to anyone reading this post...)
Ideally, in our first meeting (Week 2B) we will look at a task or theme or topic you plan to teach that ICT might lend itself to, and then we can come up with a plan for how we might integrate ICT into that unit. We will look at modifying or creating activities for the students that leverage ICT skills, and if necessary learn those skills ourselves. I would encourage you to think about how we can make the tasks we design highly student centric, providing your students with higher order thinking skills and open ended opportunities for creative thinking.
Our second meeting (Week 5A) will be to follow through on how the project is going, what can be improved, what can be tweaked, and also to ensure that any ICT skills are being delivered to both you and the students.
Our final meeting (Week 8B) will be used to evaluate and wrap up the project. We can evaluate it, look at what worked well, and work out how we might modify it to use (or not use) next year.
Hope these dates suit you. Looking forward to working closely with you all next term.
We've used this PD delivery model in the past and it seems to work quite well. I start by checking out the teachers' timetables and working out when they are free (mostly when their students are with specialist teachers for Music/PE/Languages/etc) and then I propose a list of times to meet, asking them to check and confirm that these times work for them.
Anyway, just thought I'd share that in case you can make use of it. My next few posts will be sharing some examples of how we have made this work in various classes.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Lifelong Learners?
I got interested in computers and their potential uses in teaching and learning way back in 1982 when I was at Art School/Teachers' College. I met a guy named Colin who worked in the media center at the art school who had taught himself how to program in AppleBasic on the original Apple IIe machines. He was doing all sort of really interesting stuff with these machines, writing his own programs for randomised poetry, creating graphics, creating maths problems, etc. Colin and I became good friends and I asked him to teach me how to program too. It was INSTANTLY obvious to me that computers and technology generally could be used to support, assist, extend and just generally make learning a whole lot more interesting, and even as a preservice teacher in the early 80s I was always trying to come up with interesting ways that computers could be used to make school more interesting.
Like most colleges at the time, the college I attended didn't offer any computer-based courses. I went and had a chat to the Dean and asked why. I still remember the conversation... he didn't know why, he just assumed that a computer was used for administrative stuff, keeping lists of students and managing who paid fees, etc, but hadn't really thought about their use in education. After some fast talking, I managed to convince him to let me vary my course units for the next semester to do an off-site computer programming course and have it count towards my regular course credits. And so once a week for the semester I traveled across town to a different college to do a three hour programming course.
The following year, I managed to convince the Dean that such a course should be a standard offering for everyone planning to be a teacher. To cut a long story short, the college did start to offer a course called "The Computer and the Art Educator" held offsite at another nearby university, and counting towards our regular course credits. This course used primitive graphics tablets, graphic software and programming skills to explore how computers could extend themselves into classroom use. It was 1983. I was rather pleased that I was able to play a part in helping other people see what appeared so obvious to me.
Funnily enough, there were many of my college friends who could not see the point of computers at all, and would argue with me that they had nothing to do with what happens in a classroom. They just weren't interested in learning about something that didn't interest them.
Since that time, I've worked with a lot of teachers to help them see how much better learning can be with the wise use of technology. I've tried every approach I can think of, and at the end of the day, I still don't know why some people just "get it" and some just don't. To me, it's so darn obvious! Having taught in a technology rich environment for over 20 years now, I have seen over and over how the use of technology can motivate, engage and inspire students to learn better and to be better. I've seen kids just "switch on" when they learn with computers. More than that, I've seen how the use of technology for learning can actually change a teacher's practice and pedagogy for the better. I've seen the effects of increased student motivation and engagement, and I've experienced the evolution of my own teaching to take a more student focused, more choice-driven, more differentiated approach to my teaching.
Ok, so having said all that, it drives me crazy when I see other teachers who simply don't "get it". I've experienced the frustration of working with supposedly-intelligent adults who appear to be unable to move beyond the ability to cut-and-paste. I even had one colleague at a previous school admit that she had been avoiding technology for years, and I found out that she did not even know how to use basic mouse functions. How do you even function in a school these days without these skills! The frustrating thing about these situations, for me, is that part of my role in this particular school was doing technology support for the staff and despite every effort to provide support for these sorts of people, they always managed to avoid any help that was offered to them. No matter what model of technology support we tried they managed to avoid taking advantage of it.
They remind me of the people in this video clip... as soon as the external forces stop, they stop too and then seem incapable of moving forward for themselves.
So that's at one end of the spectrum. At the other is people like you and I who probably just need a bit of guidance to get started and then we assume some responsibility for our own learning. We accept that if we want to learn something new, then taking on the task of learning it is actually up to us, not someone else. Any assistance we get from others is seen as a bonus, not a requirement.
I will go so far as to say that those teachers who actively avoid learning about (and teaching with) technology are abdicating their basic responsibility as teachers because they are failing to model and live out the basic quality that every teacher should have - curiosity and a sense of lifelong learning.
Every school's prospectus I've ever seen talks about how they aim to produce students who are "independent, lifelong learners", but so many teachers continue to display an embarrassingly low level of responsibility for their own ongoing learning, and are therefore poor models of what they expect from their students. I find it frustrating that so many teachers willingly accept that there are certain unavoidable parts of their job, and yet they steadfastly resist adopting the use of digital technologies and act as though they are free to pick and choose what parts of their job they are willing to enact. Why is the embracing of technology for learning still seen as so optional by so many?
The answer is probably that they don't yet see the benefits. They haven't seen the kids' eyes light up when they do something truly interesting with computers or technology. They still see it as another optional add-on to their already busy day. They see technology as something that has to be "bolted on" to what they are already doing, instead of something that can help them do what they already do even better. They might have experienced failure in the past because of something that went wrong, something that didn't work, and they don't want to look foolish again. Perhaps they just think that if they can hold out for a few more years, this will all go away, or they might make it to retirement. (although I think age has very little to do with it)
Of course, this is not true of all teachers, and there are many, many excellent educators that embody and model all of the traits of lifelong learning that they expect from their students. A lot of teachers are very good at this, but there are still far too many that don't. And frankly, I think that's unacceptable.
Image: 'I am still learning'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/47244805@N00/303567279
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:30 — 4.5MB)
Breaking the Cycle
I often ponder why systemic change is so hard to make happen in education. Systemic change (and by that I mean not just change from a handful of scattered individuals but an all-in buy-in to create change right across a school system) is never easy, but it seems to happen with far less resistance in fields outside of education. Schools just seem extra hard to shift.
I'm pretty optimistic about the positive effects that technology can bring to education. I really do believe that the school experience for both teachers and students can be made richer and more meaningful with the wise use of technology. Not just technology for technology's sake, but by making intelligent decisions about what and how our students learn and supporting that learning with appropriate technologies. I've never seen technology as an add-on, or just another thing that teachers need to somehow squeeze into their day, but rather as a deeply embedded set of tools, methodologies and skillsets that students should acquire in order to help them deal with the ongoing process of learning.
Students are, or at least should be, seen as "knowledge workers" in the truest sense of the term. They spend 13 years at school essentially learning, manipulating, constructing and deconstructing knowledge. Their "job" as a student is to create information products, and that could mean anything from conducting research and writing essays, through to creating sophisticated information products like multimedia presentations, collaborative group projects and persuasive written work. Unlike students in the past, today's students need to develop fluency in not just textual literacy, but also in the multiliteracies of new media, multimedia and social media. They need to develop the skills of taking information from multiple sources and turning it into usable knowledge. In the process of doing this they need to learn important things like how to express ideas clearly, how to influence an audience, how to work in teams, how to learn on demand, how to communicate, and so on.
In essence, none of this is all that new, and good teachers have always done these sorts of things with their students. But pervasive digital technology has an important role to play in how it happens. Take the research process for example. Asking students to research a topic is fundamental to what happens in most classrooms and most teachers have always included the requirement for research in the learning tasks they set. But digital technology opens up many new possibilities for how a student might tackle the research process. Use of live streams, real-time information, geotagged data, RSS feeds, socialgraph feeds, even advanced Googling, may all just be new ways to perform the age-old process of research, but if a teacher lacks basic fluency in these new tools themselves then how on earth can they help their students develop those skills. In my experience, most teachers have very little idea about most of these things, but don't take my word for it. Do your own poll... pick a random group of 20 teachers and ask them what they know about these things. I suspect the answer will be very few.
It worries me that so many teachers seems so woefully ill-equipped to provide these understandings for their students, but they simply can't provide what they don't have. I know a lot of wonderful, dedicated, well-meaning teachers who care deeply for their students, but the gap, technologically speaking, between what those students need and what their teachers are actually able to provide seems to be widening.
Before you flame me for making such a comment, can I make clear what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that these people are bad teachers. But I do think that the landscape of learning has experienced some deep and fundamental shifts in the last few years that many teachers have yet to even acknowledge, let alone adapt to.
In some cases, success can be the enemy of change. I once suggested to a very good teacher that there were a number of ways that technology could be used to enrich her lessons. Her reply was that every single one of her students achieved Band 6 results in the HSC (for those outside NSW, that's about as good as you can get), so why should she change anything? Trying to convince this teacher that technology might make the learning more engaging, more interesting, more rewarding was falling on deaf ears. By her standards the students were as successful as they could possibly be, so why mess with something that was obviously working? That's a hard argument to win, and makes it very difficult to convince someone to change what they do.
The other thing that makes it incredibly difficult to create systemic change in education is the "revolving door" nature of school. We all know what school looks like and how it works, because we all went to one. So when someone decides to become a teacher, it's usually right after spending 13 years in a school as a student, then spending 4 years at teachers college and then going right back into the same environment they just left a few years earlier. Of course they know what school is like! They probably feel like they've never left it. Whatever they might learn in teachers college has to fight for attention against the 13 years of day-in and day-out seeing their own teachers model what it means to "be a teacher". Even their lecturers at teachers college often come from a similar experience. It's incredibly hard to break the cycle. Education needs significant change and new approaches, but it's damn difficult to make that change happen when the steady stream of new teachers are just recycled students who feel like they already know what they need to know in order to be a teacher.
I've done a little bit of work with pre-service undergrad teachers, and to be honest I was quite shocked at their general level of apathy about the role that technology might play in their lives as future teachers. Not all of them mind you... there have been some good ones, but the number who openly admit to disliking technology or not relating to technology or not being interested in technology just scares me. These people will be going into classrooms as teachers in the next few years, and instead of being the much-needed catalyst for systemic change, many of them will just fall into the same old establishment that they experienced themselves during their own school life. No wonder it's so hard to make the shift happen!
Let me finish with a story. I was having lunch in a little café in Newtown a while back, and when the waitress came with the bill at the end of the meal I paid for it with my Teachers Credit Union credit card. When she looked at the card she remarked on it and asked me if I was a teacher. I told her yes, and she asked what I taught. I told her that was a technology integrator, to which she asked "What's that?"
I meet lots of people who have never heard of a technology integrator, so I replied with my standard answer. "I go into classrooms and work with students and teachers to help them use technology in more meaningful ways."
"Really?" she said. "I'm in third year at teachers college, and I've never heard of anything like that. So do kids use computers in schools much? Is technology, like, important?"
Third year teachers college. "Is technology, like, important?" This woman could be teaching your child in the next few years. OMG.
I'm sorry if I seem crotchety and snarky about this, but to me, this is just not good enough. How on earth will we ever break this cycle? We keep getting technologically clueless teachers incubating the next generation of technologically clueless teachers, and so on. We live in a world that is changing so rapidly, but the teaching profession seems to be stuck in some sort of endless Groundhog Day loop.
Image: 'Magic Revolving Door'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/32916905@N05/3074941476
Popularity: 4% [?]
11 Things that make a Difference
I did post a version of this about a year ago, but my mate Bryn Jones from Perth recently revamped the "10 Things that make a Difference" list. He recently added an 11th thing, and it's a pretty good list, so I thought I'd repost it here for your consideration.
So, for what it's worth, here are 11 Things that seem to make a difference in helping teachers get up to speed with using ICT.
1. Emotional Support
If you look at how teachers are using technology in schools, it ought to be pretty clear that some really “click” with it and some don’t. In fact, if you look at statistics, about 75% are just doing it because they feel they have to, and about 16% are downright obstinate about not doing it. It’s incredibly threatening to these people if they feel they are being forced to adopt technologies and work practices they really don’t understand. I found it fascinating that the number one things that teachers need in order to integrate ICT is emotional support. Sometimes, they just need to know that other folk understand how they’re feeling and will “be there for them”.
For schools, this means they really need to ensure these teachers have support and backup to ease them into this new world. This is where mailing lists, online resources and personal learning networks can be so great - they can offer constant support and a place to turn. It’s important that schools set up internal structures to support their staff.
2. A Shared Pedagogical Understanding
Having some understanding of pedagogy - the science of teaching - is an incredibly important part of being a good teacher, and really has nothing to do with technology, not directly anyway. But when we start talking about integrating technology it’s crucial to do it from a pedagogical perspective. You may have heard the saying that technology in a classroom can be used to do old things in new ways. If that’s all you use it for, you’re missing the real benefit. Technology lets you do entirely new things. Things that could not be done previously. Bunging a whole lot of computers into a school and using them to do the same sorts of things you’ve always done is a bit like strapping a jet engine onto a horse and cart. At the end of the day, it’s still a horse and cart. Having a good understanding of pedagogy lets you make informed decisions about where technology works and where it doesn’t. And when an entire school staff has the same shared vision… that’s when magic happens!
3. A Constructivist Philosophy
Constructivism, in a nutshell, says that if you create the right learning environment then students will build (or construct) knowledge and learning for themselves. Constructivism takes the focus off “teaching” and places it on “learning”. It sometimes means teachers have to take their hands off the controls, let go a little, and realise that the best kind of learning happens when students work things out for themselves and not always when they get “taught”. You may have heard the phrase, “I taught them, but they just didn’t learn!”
Computers and communication technologies are amazing tools for moving the centre of power in a classroom over to the students, and this is a really hard thing for many teachers to get to grips with. As teachers, we are used to “controlling the class”, having “good discipline”, and calling the shots.
In many ways, constructivism turns all of that on its head. When you introduce technology into a classroom, you suddenly invite your students to learn at different rates, about different ideas, catering to different interests and abilities. These are good things, but it certainly changes the balance of power in the classroom.
If you understand something about Constructivism, you realise this can be a great thing, but if you don’t, it’s pretty scary. That’s why adding computers to schools without developing teachers’ ability to change the things they do simply doesn’t work.
4. At Least Four Computers per Classroom
(Or more generally – proximity of computers to learning areas) Not two. Not three. According to research, you need at least 4 computers in a learning area before you start to see a change in the way technology affects learning. This is probably more applicable to Primary classrooms than Secondary, but I found it an interesting statistic.
The bottom line is that unless you can get access to technology, it’s obviously not going to have an effect. It’s all about ubiquity of technology within a school - kids (and teachers) need to be able to get their hands on it if it’s going to have any impact.
5. Help to Access Appropriate Material
The keyword here is “help”. Sure, teachers need to be able to get their hands on the right resources. But if they don’t know how to do it for themselves, they’ll always need help. You can give them a fish, or you can teach them to fish. I know what I’d prefer.
6. Just-in-Time Technical and Skills Support
Related to Point 1, this is not just about emotional support but real, hands-on support. Having someone to turn to when you need ideas and answers. Having someone to actually come and give you a hand, show you what to do, tell you what button you need to press, whatever it takes to give you what you need.
7. Reliable Infrastructure
If you want to kill off whatever enthusiasm exists in your school for using ICT, just rev up a teacher with grand stories of what technology can do in their lessons, about how it can enthuse the kids and lead to whole new paradigms of education, and send them into a classroom where the Internet connection drops out at the crucial moment. Or the mice don't work. Or the machines freeze regularly. Guarantee they won’t back to try again in a hurry.
Schools really have to ensure that everything works, all the time. Not most of the time; all of the time. Everywhere, for everyone. Until you have that, it’s an awful hard slog to build excitement about the joys of technology.
8. Access to Professional Development, but not necessarily participating in it
It’s the last bit of that which intrigues me. Research found that if you want teachers to get on the technology bandwagon they had to have access to PD, which makes sense. But they don’t want to be forced to participate in it. Sort of like a safety net. I know when we run PD for teachers, they like to be able to focus on the things they need, and not get bogged down in the things they don’t need. Break PD into a smorgasbord of pick-and-choose modules, so people can pick the bits they need, and feel empowered by the bits they already know.
9. Links to School from Home
If you can think of a better way to do this other than through the use of the Internet and ICT, let us know. It’s all part of the move to gain anyplace, anytime learning. Why should the school day stop at 3:30? (well, maybe for teachers that’s a good thing, but why for kids?) The school and the home, and in fact the whole community, why shouldn’t there be a blurring of the boundaries between these. There isn’t much point working with ICT on projects at school if you can’t continue with them from home.
10. Leadership
You must have known this one was coming eventually. Putting ICT to work in a school requires leadership and vision. It takes someone to stand out the front and say “We’re going this way! Follow me!” Without that shared vision, it always comes down to a couple of keen individuals who push the technology barrow, but for a systematic change to sweep through a school it takes leadership. Lots of it.
11. Flexible Learning Spaces
Since this article was written a few years ago, Flexible Learning Spaces has emerged as another critical factor. Are there areas for large groups, small groups, noisy groups, quiet groups? Can students find somewhere to rehearse presentations, make films? Can a large piece of work such as a claymation or time lapse photography project or science experiment be left in place over several periods without disturbance.
So, what do you think... does this list of factors (which were originally shared way back in 2002) still hold up five years later? Has anything really changed? What else, if anything, are the other factors that make a difference to teachers with regard to ICT
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Enough Excuses
UK blogger Terry Freedman wrote a great post on the TechLearning blog called "Oh Sir, you are too kind". He actually wrote it a while ago now (Sept 07) but I only just stumbled across it... I guess that's one of the great things about blogs, the way they can capture someone's thoughts at a particular point in time and make them available to anyone, even people who stumble across them much later.
Terry's basic premise is to ask why we keep putting up with teachers who can't or won't get to grips with ICT in their teaching. He seems to think that it's time to tell teachers that ICT is an important component of being a teacher and that if you can't, won't or don't get yourself up to speed with technology and how it should be used to integrate with student learning then it may be time to find another job. And he suggests that we are being way too nice about accepting this sort of thing, and allowing the laggards to get away with it.
He's absolutely right of course. The laggards ARE still lagging, and schools don't seem to be willing to draw the line in the sand and start demanding some ROI on the millions of dollars they've spent in professional development over the years. Terry says we are too nice. OK Terry, here goes...
For many years now I have been in the position of someone who works with teachers to assist them learn about, and then embed, technology into their teaching. Some get excited about the possibilities it offers, and some have actually told me that they have no intention of doing anything about it. Some say that they are too old, some say they are close enough to retirement that they aren't going to worry about it, and most tell me that are just too busy with all the other stuff they need to do. It ticks me off to hear the excuses that teachers come up with about why they can't integrate technology into their teaching... "I don't have enough time, I'm so busy" is the commonest one.
Poppycock. We all have 24 hours in a day. We're all busy, we all have too much to do and not enough time to do it... so how come some people are able to learn and apply what they need to learn and apply, and others cannot? If we all have the same amount of time in our day, then it's clearly NOT a matter of finding time, no matter how much people use that as an excuse. Are they suggesting that the people who do learn this stuff have more time on their hands? Do I not have enough things to do, so I'll just get good at using technology in all my spare time? If they don't want to learn what they ought to know, then just come out and say so, but don't insult me with the "I don't have time" excuse, because trust me, I don't have time either.
Is it intelligence? Maybe some people are just too stupid to use a computer. Maybe some people really are incapable of learning this stuff? Aptitude has something to do with I'm sure, but that only explains why some people might pick technology skills up quicker than others... it doesn't explain why some don't seem to be able to pick it up at all. Especially when you see the basic, basic stuff that seems to confuse some people... I mean jeez, how hard is it to make a frickin' folder and save something in it? Trained monkeys could do that. If people are too stupid to learn basic, low level operational skills, then maybe they are too stupid to teach.
But we all know that time and intelligence have nothing to do with it. There is only one factor in this that really matters, and that's the motivation to learn these things. After 30 years of the personal computer being in our schools, ongoing opportunities for professional learning, and the continual development of better, simpler and more intuitive technologies, there are no valid excuses that teachers could possibly dream up to justify why they could not or should not be actively embedding information and communication technologies into their classrooms. We manage to do all the other stuff that teaching entails - write reports, do playground duty, turn up to class on time - but for some reason when it comes to adopting the use of ICTs in our work too many people still feel they have the right to treat that as optional. It's not. It's part of the job of being a 21st century educator. You don't have to like it, you just have to do it.
I think Terry's right... it's time for those teachers who have not accepted ICTs to shit or get off the pot. I'm tired of accepting excuses. Technology is, and will continue to be, an absolutely integral part of the lives our students will lead. The work we are doing in our classrooms to prepare them for this future must contain a significant amount of access to, and understanding of, this technology or we are failing them as teachers. To be a technologically illiterate teacher in the 21st century is unacceptable, unethical and unprofessional. To hold students back from using the tools that they need to be literate for the 21st century is, quite frankly, immoral.
Seriously, if becoming technologically literate is too hard, or you don't think it's "your cup of tea", then get out now. Quit. Let someone else take over and do the incredibly important work of educating our young people using the tools they deserve.
Thanks for getting me fired up Terry.
Image: 'Car Problems'http://www.flickr.com/photos/26013750@N00/3789495858
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A Letter to Teachers about Learning
I'm running a course for our school staff at the moment called 23 Things. I borrowed the idea from the very successful 23 Things program run by the San Jose library, but have adapted it slightly for our particular school situation.
Essentially, the teachers work their way through 23 separate tasks, some as simple as reading a blog post or watching an online video tutorial, while some are a little more complicated such as setting up their own blog, feedreader and delicious accounts. The course runs over 9 weeks in total, and each week they are asked to do 3 or 4 "Things" - 23 in total - that will expose them to a wide range of Web 2.0 tools and ideas by the time it's over.
I'm running the course internally using our school Moodle, and have set it up in such a way that people must sign up for the course and work their way through it a week at a time. I thought it sounded like a good idea, and so did they it seems... 14 teachers signed up for the course very soon after I announced it.
For all the palaver that teachers carry on with to students about the importance of time management, committment, and handing work in on time, it amazes me just how "flexible" a group of teachers expects a course to be. So far I've had one official drop-out, and really only 3 or 4 people who appear to be doing much at all. If this was their students that were taking such a relaxed approach to a course of study, I wonder if they would be quite so flexible and understanding.
I can't write a note home to their parents, so instead I wrote a note to them... here's what it said.
Some folk feel a little awkward or intimidated when they feel they don't know how to do something... doing a course like this must feel a bit strange because you're getting asked to do things that you have no idea how to do.
Let me remind you of something... the reason you are in this course (one can only surmise) is that you DON'T know how to do these things, but that you'd like to learn. So it's ok not to know how to do them, or to not understand them. Applaud yourself for taking the plunge and signing up for 23 Things in an attempt to learn more about these things you don't know.
Now, here's a secret... if you have the Internet, you can learn to do almost anything. Try going to www.youtube.com and in the search box, type the thing you want to learn how to do... so, if you want to know how to set up Google Reader, go to YouTube and type "set up google reader"... you'll find a bunch of tutorials to show you how. If you want to know how to make a Caesar salad, try typing in "how to make caesar salad" and viola! Dinner is almost served!
One of the unavoidable facts of life in the 21st Century is that Information is Abundant. If simple facts and data is what you need, or you want instructions on how to do something, then there is no shortage of information about it. In a previous age, school was predicated on the notion that Information is Scarce. Thanks to the Internet and tools like Google it no longer is, and this has changed the very nature of education. One of our greatest challenges in education nowadays is to deal with this idea that Information is no longer scarce... our students can (potentially) know as much (or more) than us about a particular topic. It doesn't matter how much we know, there will always be more we don't know.
For this reason we have to be continual learners, and we have to learn how to find answers to things that we don't yet know. If this course was delivered face to face, I'd be able to explain and show you a lot of this stuff... but it's not. And so you need to figure some things out for yourself and motivate yourself to find answers to problems that crop up.
By all means, I will help you if you get stuck and need a hand. But sometimes working it out for yourself can be the best thing you can do for yourself.
I have no idea whether it will make a difference or not, but I felt better after writing it.
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