Tag: pd

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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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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

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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