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?

Sweet GalleyCat

 

Technology as Connectivity

High school is on my mind this week. 

It's the strangest sensation to finish teaching a lesson to twenty-seven seventh-grade faces, get in my car, drive across town, and be oriented to my new (enormous, foreboding, exciting, oh-so-grown-up) high school campus. It's as if something in the air changes.

Possibilities in high school seem endless. And expectations and responsibilities, for teachers and students alike.

I suspect my professional learning community will be more essential than ever. But how to use it is a little less predictable now too. It's time to innovate.

GalleyCat is made for cases just like this. One of the sixteen blogs run by MediaBistro, GalleyCat is the  media organ's pulse on all things publishing, which may seem like an incredibly tiny cross-section of a language arts teacher's domain, but this blog is replete with "points of contact" for young thinkers, readers, and writers just starting out in the world of media and publishing. (After all, all writing is published for someone, whether for a national syndicate or a classroom academic debate.)

The larger MediaBistro endeavor rides on the efforts of twenty-six editors, authors, producers, directors, and managers, while GalleyCat is largely propelled by editor Jason Boog, whose diverse media experience is reflected in the deliciously eclectic assortment found in GalleyCat's feed (Maryann Yin and Dianna Dilworth also contribute, and Nadine Cheung also edits). 

GalleyCat is my choice for classroom use for several reasons:

• It regularly features tiny-yet-mighty resources for professional writers. What does this have to do with high school students? Everything. Besides the practical implications of teaching the art of writing from a media platform that is relevant and up-to-date for students, showing sophomores or juniors that their ability to communicate so well that others will actually choose to read their texts (a reality professional authors must confront every step of the way) is more powerful than tests, grades, and other less accessible applications of students' actual writing. Case in point. It also has an ongoing fling with all things Twitter, which I love due to my personal quest to tame the Twitter beast for literary purposes. (Does anyone else see Twitter as a modern rip-off of the Haiku?)

• It achieves the the single best merger of technology and authoring that I have yet seen. Seriously, the amount of book- and text-related applications available to iPad/ iPhone/ iMac users staggers the imagination. There is a great deal of debate about whether resources provided through technology really are accessible to all students (most but not all high schoolers have smart phones), but debating aside, can you just picture a high school language arts class populated by students who make use of access to 100,000 titles on their phones or tablets? Just the thought gives me chills. GalleyCat makes that dream just a little less hazy.

• It's youthful. Saying this grates my old-fashioned sensibilities, but if technology resources don't meet the most immaculate standards of aesthetic and content novelty, young people can sense its fast-approaching demise and retreat faster than the older generation even begins to suspect something going awry (sometimes the actual presence of older people/ parents). GalleyCat, though a professional platform, is intimately connected to the high school and college populations interests and concerns. Is all GalleyCat content suitable as a lesson plan resource? Probably not. But suitability isn't just about appropriateness: it's also about relevancy and authenticity, which GalleyCat appears to have in spades.

I can see myself referencing GalleyCat in everything from casual classroom discussions to text resources for formal analysis and response. The blog organizes itself into Publishing; Deals, Bookselling, Writer Resources; GalleyCat Reviews; and Jobs. The possible classroom interfaces are virtually endless, potentially contributing to research into language arts careers, reading choices, and cultural evolution. GalleyCat also has the crucial benefit of being a well-oiled cog in a well-represented media machine: it isn't a freelance blog floating on its own in the infinite void of social/professional media, and it shows. It's brief, sharp, shiny.

I feel nervous about a lot of aspects of moving into the high school classroom, but about using GalleyCat in my lessons is one thing I would feel absolutely confident.

The Question of Accessibility

We've all heard the aphorisms.

Technology as being physically present

All great progress is met with resistance at first. People are scared of what they don't know. Societies are always slow to embrace new technology. 

And then there are the more specific indictments.

If a doctor from three hundred years ago time-traveled to here and now, he wouldn't be able to perform medicine at all. But if a teacher time-traveled here, he would be able to walk into a classroom and teach with practically no difference.

But I wonder, when we examine the merits of progress and technology in education, what do we mean by technology exactly? To follow the scenario from above, if an ancient Greek were transported to our age and listened in on our debates over technology, he might assume we were fighting over any given skill. Technology simply means the study of technê— trade or skills or art forms that usually involved hands working with physical substance.

And so when we ask when technology works and when it doesn't, which skills do we mean? What physical substance? Books, pencils, loose leaf paper, and even desks are technology too.

At the risk of being obtuse, I can't help but wonder whether it might be helpful to pinpoint what manifestations of the almost-endless resources surrounding us in our classrooms we are asking about. When we consider the helpfulness of SmartBoards and iPads, are we questioning the physical presence of those iPad on the students' desks, or are we just questioning what skills Steve Jobs' products have made available to students, or do we dig deeper and ponder the meaning of the physical presence of those teknia?

If technology simply meant the skills made available to students through electronic media, we might come up with a chart something like this:

Technology Works

Technology Doesn’t Work

·      When students are presenting visual or auditory projects (PowerPoints, Prezies, videos, photo collections). ·      When students are collaborating on long-term projects of any kind and need more access to each other than during school hours. ·      When students are researching and need both breadth and depth of materials. ·      When students are constructing formal, objective summaries of performance-based activities. ·      When students need to learn the technology-inferface aspects of language.

·      When students are engaging in Think-Pair-Share with a partner. ·      When students are quietly reading. ·      When students are participating in class discussions. ·      When students are working in small groups (tea parties, jigsaws, give one/ give one). ·      When students are freewriting. ·      When unpracticed students need to codeswitch from casual to formal tech use. ·      When students need to move from the research to analysis stage of thinking and writing.

In this paradigm, technology works when it accomplishes a task that needs resources that can't be brought into the classroom without it (like having millions of pages of information available to be researched online) or when using the technology itself is one of the desired skills. It doesn't work when the goal of the activity is for students to problem-solve with each other orally and casually and in the moment or when the social programming involved with technology inhibits creativity (I've heard lots of students of all ages say that it's tempting to delete work that they don't like when working electronically but that it's not so easy when there's a paper trail).

But if technology means something about how a physical environment changes when there are touch screens, monitors, doc cams, and class blogs, maybe the list would include points that answer questions like these:

• How does reading on a screen affect learning differently than reading from a page?

• How does drawing a poster that's hung on a wall affect learning differently than photoshopping an image that's displayed on a screen?

• How does engaging with a classmate face-to-face affect learning differently than creating a comment thread on a blog?

• How does the physical space created by non-digital technology (like books and paper and pens) affect learning differently than the physical space created by SmartBoards, AppleTV, and iPads?

As I learn to create the best learning environment for my students, I am hoping to figure out how to use technology—all of it, not just the kind that plugs into an outlet—to equip my students to engage the world of ideas and the world of physicality equally well.

Magical Google Forms

Rubric: TodaysMeet in a Secondary English Classroom

Technology use in the classroom is somewhat of a bluebird of happiness for English teachers. English Language Arts by contemporary definition necessitates a complicated interweb of communication—reading, writing, speaking, listening, observing (we'll call them Rx5)—and in many cases these are not the methods to achieve content ends but they are the content ends. In a math classroom, students need to be able to participate in these five forms of communication in order to understand, apply, and create new material based on mathematical concepts. But in an English classroom, students need to understand and apply these communication for their own sake. That's part of what English teachers grade students on. It's a large part. Nearly all of the part?

Technology as the bluebird of happiness

TodaysMeet, then, certainly drops a few bright blue feathers in the path of haggard English teachers who are constantly looking for technology tricks that will enhance their classroom so that students both can excel individually in Rx5 and as a class. First, TodaysMeet gets students using technology. That in itself fulfills the urgent, sometimes spoken and sometimes unspoken, compulsion of the Common Core Standards toward increased integration of technology in classroom models. Second, students are writing. This is no easy feat, especially in the younger grades of junior high ("Ms. Cash! I need to sharpen my pencil/ can't find my pencil/ need an eraser/ accidentally stabbed my left toe with my pencil and now it's bleeding can I go to the office?"). Third, students are writing about what they are hearing, observing, and hopefully for some at least what they are speaking. Fourth, TodaysMeet provides an automatic digital footprint of individual student work and of the trek of the whole class through a period, a week, a unit. Does it get much better than this?

It does. TodaysMeet gives a voice (and a "pencil") to an entire class and to shy students who wouldn't willingly speak out in whole group. It allows for a beautiful, rapid-fire conversation among students. You might say that technological models like TodaysMeet were crafted with the lower orders of Bloom's Taxonomy in mind—it is ideal for arranging, listing, matching, reproducing, and labeling. With careful teacher guidance, it can even be used for constructing, demonstrating, calculating, questioning, and testing. But the sustained and reflective practice needed for the upper orders of Bloom's doesn't naturally fit with the instantaneous, broad-versus-deep platform TodaysMeet offers. What about deep, edited responses to deep edited responses of another student? What about generating communication through multiple mediums, not just words but also colors, shape, sound? (English teachers care about these things too!)

And then there is the question of providing up to thirty-six students or at twelve small groups with iPads or computers. Perhaps most technology rubrics assume that technology is available—or they list availability as the first assessment. But again, especially in the younger grades, it is not simple or necessarily desirable by any means to pass out iPads to certain doom. Our fifth period seventh grade English class spent fifteen minutes last Tuesday trying to find out by all manner of secret ballot and personal pleading which student it was who locked one of the iPads used in the class the day before. 

Sometimes technology has matured to a point beyond that of our students.

Platforms like TodaysMeet truly are bluebirds of happiness—for very specific uses, with very specific purposes, when technology offers the most learning-friendly opportunity for Rx5 skills, and when teachers know that students won't habitually lock the iPads.