Rose is a rose is a rose, etc.

The question of whether students in 21^st century American classrooms are “digital natives” is a well-investigated question. Huffington Post published an inaugural introductory article for the masses in September 2012, “A Teacher’s Challenge: Empowering Today’s Digital Natives for Tomorrow.” Before then, slightly more niche Internet voices were already taking a position on the digital native debate; Campus Technology, for instance, published their opinion (admittedly oriented more toward technology use among college students) in “Will the Real Digital Native Please Stand Up?” And long, long before that, academians were writing eloquent and highly specialized essays, claiming the question had already become hackneyed (“Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” Marc Prensky, NCB University Press). As it often the case, it is this perspective from “the turn of the century” when people and especially scholarly people become reflective and a delightful mix of nostalgic and visionary that most informed my initial investigation into the technology citizenship of my own students:

Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

At first blush, it is always the sheer amount of time our students spend with technology that elicits the most gasps, headshakes, and brows furrowed in teacherly resolve that we must redeem the children, redeem the media, and redeem ourselves. Ten thousand hours playing video games? We own more or less 1100 hours of their lives per school year: by the time they graduate, we will have exerted at least that much influence over them. Ah, but what about when we added the twenty thousand hours of television? The truly immeasurable tens of thousands of hours spent (as Marc Prensky wouldn’t have yet known in 2011) on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Imgur, YouTube, etc. etc. etc.? The stalwart teacher blanches. We cannot amass more hours in the classroom than hours in the digital world; it is a physical impossibility. And so we about face. If books and whiteboards cannot win, then screens and connectivity must be drafted into the cause. Educational technology became the way, oddly and with an irony few notice, to win against all other forms of technology. The greater pull recreational technology has on students, the more fabulously educators swear allegiance to integrating technology in the classroom. Since Marc Prensky penned (yes, we know he typed his essay, but for ideological purposes let us imagine that he might have, out of habit from his childhood, scribbled down the first notes of his treatise on paper with pen or pencil) his inquiry into digital nativehood, educators have become more and not less frightened at the prospect of technology in the classroom. PLCs and department meetings at junior highs and high schools are preoccupied with the learning, unlearning, and relearning of each new technology districts and states prescribe (or suggest). Most recently, digital doc cams have been replaced with iPad and Apple TV duos: and I do mean replaced. One fellow teacher lamented two weeks ago when the bulb burnt out on her doc cam; the expensive bulb would absolutely not be paid for by the school because it was already outdated technology. The teacher mournfully began using the Apple TV screen that had been installed in her classroom long before. Most students prefer it, when queried, but my colleague regrets its existence every day.

And this is where the crux of my question lay. When I began researching my students covertly through observation of what they said and did in the classroom and openly by asking them questions they tentatively then gustily replied to, I wanted to know what they thought of their own history with technology. What do students—even, no, especially, the ones who were only just born when Marc Prensky wrote his essay—think about their technology use? What is their own perception of their experience of technology? Most importantly, how does my students’ experience of technology at school and at home differ?

What I heard from my students, and interestingly what I do not hear from any Internet source, amateur or academic, is not that schools lag in their use of technology; not that students use computers more at home than at school and “why do I have to handwrite this at school”; not that teachers are technologically inept compared with students (at least not most of them); and not that students wish there were more technology at school (this was a tricky question as every self-respecting teenager takes a lot of explaining to understand that “more technology at school” does not mean free license to be on Instagram all day for any and all purposes). What I heard from my students, when I listened in between the lines, is “I have a smartphone but all I know how to do on it is access a few social media sites. No one has ever explained to me why we use an iPad in my English classroom instead of a whiteboard, and honestly I kind of prefer the whiteboard. I’ve never written an essay on a digital device at home in my life, and I like writing essays on the computers in the library at school because it helps me feel less insecure that I don’t really know how to write an essay. I’ve never been taught how to research online, and I’ve never even been taught how to type with more than three fingers so I have to write really slowly.” And most of all what I heard was, “We can’t afford a computer at home anyway.”

What I learned from my students in the little cracks and crevices between their words, where all their vulnerable confessions lay quiet and still and maybe even a little ashamedly, was that they do not consider themselves digital natives. They don’t even know what digital natives are because adults invented that term. It is irrelevant to them whether they are the first generation to own smartphones en masse before they have a driver’s license. It is irrelevant to them whether their social studies teacher using a doc cam or an Apple TV. It is irrelevant to them whether they do assessments on a desktop or an iPad. Students, from what I learned in the last several months of listening and watching, are far better barometers of what they are actually learning—no matter the medium it comes through—than the assessments and research we impose on them to further our own ideological pro- or anti- or ambivalent-toward technology positions. My students, even though they did not suspect it, were actually teaching me how to navigate the turbulent currents of educational technology. My only guiding question as I steer my classroom forward in the coming years will be, Does this technology benefit my students more than anyone else concerned, and does it benefit them more than the alternatives? My allegiance is not to what the Internet says about what  “young people these days” know or feel about technology. My allegiance is not even (don’t tell anyone this secret) what my administration or district tell me about what is good for my students. My allegiance is to what my students tell me about their technology needs. This doesn’t mean that my students will be let loose to play Angry Birds all day. It means that I will work very hard to make a safe and wise environment in which students and myself discover together what is truly helpful for their learning. Technology, when you get right down to it, is only one factor in that commitment.

As a final reflection to these last ten weeks of learning, I was prompted by what I saw in my students to think about my own technology usage, both in my personal life and in the my classroom. If the students’ bottom-line was what they learn, my own bottom-line needs to be the same. I have learned to think less pensively and more critically about how I teach and how I facilitate learning. I have learned to cast my research net wide and to throw out everything but the most succulent pieces of advice. I have learned to begin a network so that I can support and be supported by other educators who are grappling with the same questions and goals. I have learned how wonderfully pitifully little I know about technology: I have learned, accordingly, that I very much want to take a computer programming class, and a Microsoft office class, and tons of other classes, not because these technologies will be eternal in their relevance but because I will only respect myself as much I can when I investigate the tools I use as extensively as I can. I have learned that students are capable and knowledgeable peers as I and my colleagues determine what our students’ classroom experiences will look like. And in my personal life, I have learned that habit trumps all. If I habitually am afraid of change, this will determine my attitude toward technological possibilities and will plug my eyes and blind my eyes toward what might truly benefit my students and myself. If I am habitually mourning the loss of journaling with pen and paper in the park, and hunting for an armful of Dover thrift editions at the local bookstore, and a brisk evening with a reading club at the local café where the fireplace crackles with warmth and invention and yet I do nothing to reclaim those things in my life, then I will automatically and always feel resentment toward anything with a screen or a keypad or a web address. If I habitually insist on characterizing myself as “old fashioned” and use that adjective as an increase for being ornery and petulant, then I am not really benefiting my students and am in fact creating an ever-growing gap between their future and my past. I learned in the past weeks that it is good to be reticent and argumentative and inept toward technology, and more than anything, it’s good to take the first wavering steps toward changing myself, not just for the sake of my students, but for my sake as well.

As Gertrude, after sipping her lemonade, might say,

"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

Loveliness extreme.

Extra gaiters. 

Loveliness extreme.

Sweetest ice-cream.

Page ages page ages page ages.

Wiped Wiped wire wire.

Sweeter than peaches and pears and cream."

What It Takes to Win

Learning as tactical advantage
(photo credit)

Like at all schools in the district I believe, my high school uses Aeríes to management its student data. When I first heard the name of this student information system (SIS), I thought that for some reason my teacher had mentioned the Roman god of war (I’m still a little unclear why the database was named after a bird of prey, which is only a little better than a god of prey). But the misconception stuck because in fact there has been something elusively militant about each of the instances that I have looked up a particular student in this database: either I’m wondering about previous behavior interventions, or about how far their test scores have fallen, or whether they are SED (socio-economically disadvantaged), or whether they live at an address requiring them to take a long bus ride to school, or whether their parents both work, and where, and did they graduate from high school, or whether an AP has entered counseling notes, or really any reason that students might have a violent reaction against short blond English teachers or short blond teachers’ content delivery or classroom management. Aeríes gives me nearly endless ammunition to use in my battle to understand my students and their performance, whether they like it or not.

Do I sound a little reluctant? Yet acrimonious? Until this week I would have continued to grit myself against using the system and used it anyway.

But this week Aeríes helped me to deflect the nearest miss to my teacherly identity yet. When a conflict with a student mushroomed from a verbal tiff during class to a walking away from me after class to a third-hand report from the student’s case manager to a spectacular personal insult (as spectacular as an insult can be coming from a high school freshman), I armed for battle. Not to understand the student, but to understand her documented identity. All of those elements listed above—where she’s been and what conflicts she’s been in before and how they were handled—any hint or whiff of why she and I ended up in a clash and how I might possibly find some—any—point of mutual contact with her—all of those elements were available to me through Aeríes within five minutes.
External conflict with this student hasn’t been resolved, but my own internal conflict has. And now I’m conflicted about that.Being able to learn about a person—even a student, whom sometimes we forget are people too—from a distance with limited firsthand conversation gives one a sense of power. And teachers need power. In order to manage the classroom education of dozens or hundreds of power, we need power. Informational power.But the more I know about my students from records and documents and cum files, the more the power of their identity becomes shared between them and me. They may not like it or they might not even know about it, but I have a say in their identity because I have a say in the way their identity is documented.

All I know at this point is that I want a truce. I want my students to have much of a say as possible in who they want themselves to be and how that information is stored and communicated and passed along to the next people in their lives who facilitate their learning. If there’s any hope for armistice, students need to own their identity more than I do.

Appfinity

Technology as excited learning

For the last three weeks in my freshman high school classroom, life has been sans Apple TV. And it makes me sad. Weeping, wailing, gnashing on the inside kind of sad. The girl who professed eternal fidelity to the outgoing doc cam is now reconsidering her pledge. Doc cams, sure, enable the instructor or a volunteering student to mark the text or write margin notes on a piece of paper so that the rest of the class can observe and depending on the day either copy or critique. A teacher can make double or triple emphasis on a portion of a textbook or handout by placing it under the camera, then adjusting the focus and light and position and swallowing back a more forceful reaction at the sight of a two-foot version of her hand projected on the whiteboard (why didn't I repaint my nails last night?) as students either watch the board alone or attempt a here-then-there glancing between their own text and the image.


But with Apple TV it's all different. You know what you can use on those screens? Apps. Loads of 'em. Here are three that I'm especially pining (and currently unable) to try in my classroom.


Rory's Story Cubes.

This app is freshmen friendly because of its game-like appearance anchored with a more teacher-satisfied interface between image and word. Students think that they are playing a game in which they roll virtual dice that give them a series of images (stars, planes, crossroads, parachute), but the wily instructor knows that these innocuous pictures provide an especially fun, once a week warm up that nudges students to make connections between what they imagine in one medium (picture) with what resources they have in another (word). And the genre is completely up to the teacher! Will students be asked to write a story based on the images—or a poem? a summary of a recently read text? The options are endless.


Cultiwords.

This app is all about how the teacher uses it. One part SAT vocabulary study and one part Friday night word game, I envision this app being used slightly less frequently than the story cubes just to make sure that it doesn't begin to feel like sugar-coated discouragement. The words in the app are difficult (unctuous, cajole, anecdote), but the savvy instructor can create a team-powered game in which students aren't left to their individual funds of knowledge to construct their best or most educated guesses about meanings. Why not use this vocab to craft a word wall in the classroom so that students get even more familiar with the advanced words? Most creative use of a Cultiword in a paper or other assignment gets their name on the word wall alongside the word made that much more accessible to themselves and their classmates.


OmniGraffle.

This is my favorite. Pictures, stories, and competitive vocabulary are all good and well, but organization? That's where it's at for this English teacher. OmniGraffle touts itself as keeping content "gorgeously understandable." Swoon. It doesn't get much better than getting students excited about owning the content we want them to organize in a properly academic and logical fashion. The app allows for multiple visual work boards, from old timey parchment to colorful interconnected bubbles and everything in between. This is also a painfully expensive purchase so unlike with the other two apps, this one would be a whole-class purchase only. I can see myself using this app to facilitate a class discussion on how best to organize a text's plot; how academic and content words are etymologically related; how to construct an effective argument for a paper; and everything (and I mean everything) else in the world. I seriously believe this app could be a major step toward turning freshmen into compulsive organizers.


Now, about getting that Apple TV back in my classroom...

One-to-one and beyond

 

Technology as culture

Something strange happened this week. It was my first day in the cinderblock Latin classroom nestled among the high school's honeycomb of buildings. I tentatively knocked on the locked metal door and when it opened was bathed in light from the cheery room within. Mr. O, the jolly and sprightly instructor, ushered me in and began describing his class and students and curriculum, but I'm afraid that I didn't hear all of it because I was taking in the learning environment I had just entered. Like many of the other classrooms on this campus, it was brightly-lit, spacious, with a vaulted ceiling, and filled with thirty-six desks, more or less. Like the other classrooms it was outfitted with an Apple TV, a doc cam, and an iPad for the instruct. But when the students began filing in, this classroom started to look quite a bit different. Smart phones appeared—not smuggled out of pockets and backpacks to be held under desks or in shirt sleeves. Before the bell rang, Mr. O bustled over to one student and asked her to show me how to log into the class curriculum's website on my iPhone ("You do have a smartphone, don't you?"). When instruction began, I noticed that the student next to me had pulled out an entire iPad. What was this madness! Mr. O did not sit down once during the hour-and-a-half block period. He walked, danced, galloped, rushed, and sauntered up down and back again around the room, all with the iPad held in one hand while the other flourished across its surface. The Apple TV brimmed with content delivery—video clips, audio clips, texts manipulated and not. The student with the iPad turned out to be a focal point of, eh, classroom management. He seemed intent on looking up homework for his English class and earned many reminders from Mr. O that he was, in fact, in Latin class. Implied: not only is it inappropriate to use technology to play Minecraft during class, but also it is inappropriate to use it to do schoolwork from another class.

Later that day I sat in another cinderblock classroom, this one a slightly more universal and expected high school class. But this CP English classroom was not outfitted with an Apple TV. It did not have an iPad. I did not see a doc cam. At the teacher's table was a desktop computer and a three- or four-year-old laptop: a horizontal projected was attached to the whiteboard from which we watched the film rendition of Steinbeck. Before the bell rang, the freshmen students had their smartphones out and their earbuds in. After the bell rang, it was all pencils and paper and books until we marched over to the technology lab and used twenty-eight Dell desktops to learn Google Doc templates from the librarian. This felt more familiar: telling students to put their phones away; now to use books; now to use computers; always to comply.

Education Week Teacher's Liana Heitin describes another teacher's experience with technology-addled classroom management:

Many teachers with classroom laptops find it helpful to differentiate between words like “closed” and “signed out,” and to be clear about what state the computer should be in at any given moment. “If I’m going to do brief direct instruction, I tell them to close the Chromebooks,” said Chavarria, meaning they should fold the tops down. “They only have it open if we’re doing a task they need to follow. ... They know the difference between closing and signing out.”

In Ellis’ room recently, one student scolded another for closing the screen rather than signing out during a question-and-answer session after the video. “He said shut it down,” 13-year-old Stephon Greene reminded his classmate.

It is almost universally accepted that classroom management is a must for any classroom, regardless of the presence of technology. Even students become facilitators of classroom management. Some argue that there is more management needed in a tech-based learning environment; others argue that there is different management needed in a tech-based learning environment. When the technology presence is as great as the student presence like in 1:1 and BYOD classrooms, the arguments become higher-pitched.

If my district were to continue its pro-technology arc and adopt 1:1 or BYOD,  I would approach this new environment with enormous panic and excitement. My gut reaction would be to withhold sanctioned device use until it became a privilege for us as a class actually to be engaging content delivery through our technology. I would squelch, hesitate, gently lecture and gustily yell—make laminated copy after laminated copy of democratically-elected electronic device use guidelines—until I created more chaos than a room full of fifteen-year-old Instagram users could ever create. I would experience a philosophical and maybe even metaphysical crisis. I would spend a lot of late nights eating ice-cream and woefully mourning the relentless forward motion of an era that prefers pixels over pigments.

And then I would experiment with letting go of control. I would learn to talk with my students about what they are experiencing. What is it about Pinterest, Instragram, and Facebook that is more relevant to you than our classroom content? Is it more relevant? Teach me. Tell me what you know.

I would learn to let go of Steinbeck. And Lee. And Homer. Oh God, even Shakespeare. I would become okay with not owning them. But I would insist that someone own them. Why not my students? I would use jigsaws more, give more research opportunities, let the students teach each other and me. I would learn not to fall into a paroxysm every time I saw social media on a student's device.

I would let my own culture be changed, and the culture of the classroom. I would invite my students to shape the culture that they will be owners of in a few more years anyway. But I would also ask why, how, what if, and tell me more.

If technology became the classroom culture in my district, I would study it with my students all the more.

That's what learning is about anyway, right?