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?