When Real Life Clouds Technology's Promises

This school year started out as they all do. Full of excitement, anticipation, and new ideas for the classroom. Additionally, I was starting my position as technology coach for my school, and receiving a class set of iPads and an interactive whiteboard for my classroom. I had previously had iPads for the classroom but they were shared with other staff members. This year I was being given a set exclusively for my classes, and as a result, could customize them with the apps that would allow me to move toward the redefinition stage of my curriculum (based on the SAMR model) in my freshman English and Media Studies classes. 


In addition to my classroom technology, our district moved all student accounts to Google Drive this year so I was excited to shift toward a paperless classroom with the added benefits of more seamless peer to peer, and teacher to student collaboration. Google Drive allows me to provide students timely feedback on their written assignments by providing comments and embedding links into student work that direct them to websites that provide information and sometimes activities that can help them understand the concept with which they are struggling. For instance, I am writing a run-on sentence now which is a common problem for my freshmen as they do not often proofread their papers so I am creating a link within this run-on sentence that will guide them to a website that provides information on what a run-on sentence is and how it can be corrected.  Cool, useful and engaging things are afoot! Right? Well, not just yet.

In order to embark upon this technological journey I needed my students to create accounts on several websites including Twitter, Vocabulary.com and Kidblog.org. Easy enough? Not so fast. My Utopian vision came to a screeching halt when about half of my students had never created an online account before. Consequently, they did not understand the process, nor did they have the the requisite e-mail account necessary to create accounts for most online services. This then created the issue of having to create e-mail accounts that need to be confirmed through a verification code sent via text message to students who did not have cell phones. So much for the "students are the digital natives" theory.

Once the students had e-mail accounts, at the very least, they began creating accounts for the other services I had intended on having them use. When I was confident that the overwhelming majority of my students had created accounts for the various websites, we could now begin our exciting new journey on the technological seas. Right? Not so fast. Let's put it this way: On a Wednesday afternoon, "kitty831" might seem like a perfectly logical password to a fourteen year old girl that was just watching cat videos on YouTube; however, come Monday afternoon when the feel-good feline vibes are no longer present, the password has vacated her consciousness as well. 

At least I had another teachable moment. Monday's lesson soon changed from "understanding complex and compound sentences" to "selecting safe, memorable passwords and how to retrieve them when necessary". In the end, it realistically took over two weeks before my classes were close to being fully functional on the learning websites we would soon be using. Now could I begin creating the dream outlined in the first two paragraphs of this blog? Not quite. To be continued...

Why Students Need to Fail Through Technology

Question: Should students be allowed to use their electronic devices in school and if so to what extent?

Answer: Yes. All day, every day (kind of).

It has been an ongoing debate at schools across the globe since the dawn of portable technology. When I was in high school it was a matter of whether or not students should be allowed to have their Walkmans in school. Obviously, we've come a long way in a fairly short period of time and those periods of time will continue to become increasingly shorter as the speed of technology innovation grows exponentially every year.

With that in mind, we must inevitably embrace our inability to understand, adapt to, and react to, technology at a pace greater than its development. Thus, we must find a way to function and thrive in a perpetual position of uncertainty and unpreparedness. While older generations have a lifetime of context within which to process that idea, our current students have been raised amid this (somewhat) controlled chaos. Therefore, for them it is simply reality.

They do not particularly care if they are sharing ideas, photos, or videos via traditional e-mail, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat, Instagram, Tumblr, Vine, or the next format that will sweep the social media landscape by storm before it meets a quick and unceremonious demise. Today's teens know nothing other than a life of regular OS updates and gadgetry design based on planned obsolescence.

Current students simply care that they are communicating with one another, much like previous generations did by passing notes in class. Therefore it is irrelevant to them whether or not we want them to use their devices. Like teens through the ages, they will find a way to explore the world in which they exist, so they can create meaning and context that is relevant to their personal time and place. Inevitably, their devices are a portal to much of that meaning and context, whether we like it or not.

Consequently, we must accept (begrudgingly or otherwise) that their reality is partially our reality. Current students will soon be navigating a world without pencils, pens, or paper books. Some may never encounter the Dewey decimal system or a Scantron machine. What they will encounter; however, is a world where nearly every piece of information is at their fingertips alongside every imaginable distraction. It is therefore the obligation of today's educators to allow students to be distracted by their devices, simply so we can begin learning how to coach them to tune out those same distractions.

One of the greatest challenges technology has created, for adults and children alike, is the necessity to manage our time along with the distractions that have the potential to consume that time. If we can impart that skill to our students in a safe environment where we control the consequences, we can save many students from making those same mistakes when it could seriously impact their higher education or their livelihood.

My next blog post will go into detail about my experiences, challenges, frustrations and successes in implementing the above concept into high school classrooms.

Technology's Promises and a Teacher's Skepticism

Teachers seem to be an idealistic bunch. At the end of the day, regardless of student successes and failures, administrative and government mandates, pedagogical paradigm shifts, and societal finger-pointing, we keep coming back for more. Many teachers possess a level of expertise in their respective areas of study that would make them ideal for much higher paying jobs in the business sector. Others, including me, have forsaken previous lucrative careers in order to live as an educator. The reasons that teachers decide to enter and continue with this profession are vast, but some commonalities often revealed in conversations with peers include:

• wanting to make a difference in children's lives 
• wanting to provide a positive educational experience that was lacking in one's own childhood
• wanting to influence society in a positive manner
• wanting to affect change from within a misguided system

It is with the latter two reasons that I struggle when it comes to massive, short-sighted integration of technology in the educational process, because that is what I am sensing is happening. Districts are receiving technology funding from various sources and are under pressure to spend it (quickly) or lose it as is often the case in large bureaucratic entities. As a result, massive amounts of technology are being purchased with little thought into how and why we are adopting these tools, or more importantly what are the long-term affects on students and society as a result.

As I write this blog using Google, I am simultaneously excited about the ease of use in sharing my thoughts and ideas in an open collaborative forum and skeptical about the massive collection of data being consolidated into the hands of a few incredibly powerful and globally influential mega-corporations. As my students use district created Google Drive accounts, I am simultaneously enthused by the ability to share, collaborate, and provide timely, meaningful, rich feedback with my students, and concerned that "8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week)".

I am concerned that as an entire society, a vast majority of us are blindly embracing and promoting the tools, networks, and information controlled by a power structure and system that we outwardly distrust and protest. As an aging punk-rocker with rebellious spirit that still burns brightly, I am struggling with teaching my students to embrace a paradigm shifting dichotomy that potentially negates my deeper seeded motivations for becoming a teacher. 

Like any new tool or technology that drastically changes how things are done or perceived, there comes great reward as well as great risk. As I read about all the daily excitement, discovery, and success in articles and edtech blogs I only hope that people are sincerely considering both sides of the equation and treading at least a little bit cautiously.

Misconceptions of the “Digital Native”

I have some serious issues with the idea of our students as “digital natives” and the older generation being labeled “digital immigrants”. As a 40-something year old educator that is also a technology coach, I have been on the forefront of my district in implementing technology into my curriculum. For several years, I have encouraged students to bring their own devices as well as successfully been able to secure devices when necessary to get close to a 1:1 technology ratio. My conclusion after several years of experimentation: Students have little idea what to do with their devices.

I teach high school at a district that is low performing, and socio-economically challenged with a significant population of English Language Learners. In my two classes of freshmen students, less than 7% of them are reading at grade level, with some of them reading at levels below third grade. The reasons for this situation are complex and varied and will probably fill many of my future blog posts. The point, however, is that most of my students do not have the educational foundation, nor the intrinsic motivation to organically learn through technology. They come into class expecting the traditional lectures and pen and paper assignments with which they began their academic career.

Current high school students have grown up during the rapid development of smart phones and tablets. Consequently, most of them remember the days of only texting and calling from their devices. They were not born into the wonders of iOs and modern Google capabilities. They witnessed their evolution just like us “old-folks”. As a result, it seems that texting, using social media, and watching videos online are the skills they have truly developed. So, for this current generation of high schoolers, there is a long way to go for them to catch up to the group of children one generation behind them.

I would argue that many of our current teenagers were born on the wrong side of the technology cusp. If we as educators simply assume our students know what to do with their devices, then we are doing them a great disservice and potentially preventing them from being competitive with the true digital natives that are on the heels of the current teen generation. This group needs a significant amount of coaching and guidance when it comes to using technology for academic or learning purposes. The idea of giving them a device and saying “surprise me” is not quite here yet.