Thing 28 : Emerging
Tech: Scanning The Horizons
First, I read the New
Media Consortium Horizons reports. I read the K-12 report in which they said that
schools should be providing ways for students to continue to engage in learning
activities, both formal and non-formal, beyond the traditional school day. I
think that most schools, including my own, already do this because we offer
ebooks, databases, and web links, not to mention books, to help our students
continue learning beyond the school day. These tools are generally available 24/7/365.
The reports also say that there is going to be a shift in deep learning approaches and that you need to connect the
curriculum with real life and have the students brainstorm and implement
solutions to pressing local and global problems. I can see this working in
grades 6 through 12, maybe grades 5 through 12, but not in the earlier
grades. These students are too young,
they don't know how to read and write, add and subtract, and they don't know
how to sit still or think critically.
The reports talk about using hybrid learning designs which
enable students to use the school day for group work and project based
activities while using the network to access reading videos and other learning
materials on their own time. This
leverages the best of both environments.
There are many problems with this, first of all not all students are
willing or able to put in the time after school especially in high poverty
areas. Students are also involved in other things after the school day. Of course,
sports are always a common conflict as are jobs and family responsibilities for
older students. Its Little League time now and the students go to practice
right after school. But, the biggest
problem is that there is little or no broadband access in many places in the
state and in the country. Even many of
our teachers, who live in our community, don't have broadband because Time
Warner doesn't really service their area. Time Warner will run lines to the
area at the customer's expense but the high cost, like $10,000, often requires them
to ask their neighbors to help shoulder the expense. Such costs are not really realistic for much
of America. Many Public Libraries have a
very limited number of hours and are not within walking distance for most of
the children, including those in our district.
For these reasons, the idea of the students doing readings, watching videos,
and using websites at home on their own time is just not feasible in the
environment I work in. I can see that
there are environments and particular classes where it might be feasible, but
that is not across the board.
They also discuss how schools need to enable students to
move from one learning activity to another more organically by having a
learning design that better connects each class and set of subject matter to
each other. The first idea of allowing students to move more organically is
what the Montessori approach is all about.
Personally, I'm very interested in that approach, but there certainly
are limitations to following the Montessori method and trying to fit it into a
public school setting. Connecting
learning activities between classes is very doable I think for elementary
schools in general. In middle schools, they may be able to
do more connecting between subjects but I think it becomes very difficult. In high school, the curriculum and
skills that we expect to be taught in math and science do not necessarily
relate to each other and do not necessarily relate well to the goals of other
subject matter like English, Social Studies, Technology, Foreign Language, etc.
I think that it would be fairly doable
for high school English and Social Studies to work more collaboratively but that
require time for those teachers to do so which is not always built into the
average teachers day.
The reports then discuss incorporating real life experiences,
technology, and tools that are familiar to students, and interactions with
community members into the learning opportunities. I think that may be an
ideal, but I don't know if it was possible. Regarding technology in schools
that are already familiar to students, we have a lot of students who are not familiar
with much technology beyond the video game consoles. Most community members are at work and not
available to come in during the school day. The article talks about personalized
learning where students have a say, where learning is self-directed in group-based
learning that can be designed around each learner’s goals. This makes me think about one particular
student who has no goals. Despite my
having a conversation with her at least monthly, she says that she's not going
to graduate from high school, she's never getting a job, doesn't need to
graduate or do well in school, because she's not going to college. She is going to stay home like her mother. I don't think she understands the dire
financial straits her family is in but, of course, I cannot bring that up to
her. The other kids try hard to convince
her that she should work hard. They let
her know she should work hard to do well in high school so she can get to go to
a good college. They tell her to go to a
good college so she can get a good job.
We, the teachers and other students, just not getting through to her and
have not been able to counter her family situation. Frankly when someone has given up at 9 or 10 years
old, despite attempts by others around you, I doubt she's ever going to have
goals. We also have students in
elementary school, who said that they don't need to know how to read because
they are going to be farmers. We explain
that you need to know how to read so that you feed the right food to your
animals or plant seeds that you want planted.
I would have to say that the idea that all of our students have goals of
being surgeons or lawyers is unrealistic. Many students just don't have role
models to support of life goals like that.
In that same section, it talks about using more adaptive
learning enabled by intervention-focused machine intelligence that interprets
data about how a student is learning and responds by changing the learning
environment to meet their needs. Supposedly,
we already have this in the NWEA and i-Ready programs that our school has used
or is using. They claim to provide this
kind of service but it’s fake. When all
the program requires students to do is to click a button making a choice of a, b,
c, or d, they just click a button. They
may not even think about what they are clicking. We had kids do their “hour” test in 10
minutes because they just go click, click, click. You make a student retake the test, you can make
him wait longer in between clicks, but you can’t make him think. In the final analysis, there is a 25 percent
chance of getting any question correct.
These kind of programs often make people think that students have skills
that they've not really mastered. We have
had special education students, who are barely verbal or literate, using these
computerized learning programs and the reports act as if they are above grade
level on everything, when, in reality, they can’t spell their last name!
Another one of the difficult challenges that they mentioned
was complex thinking and communication.
The author says that communication skills must also be mastered for
complex thinking to be applied in profound ways. The article says that the most effective
leaders are outstanding communicators with a high level of social intelligence. Their capacity to connect with other people
using technology to collaborate and leveraging data to support their ideas
requires an ability to understand the bigger picture and make appeals that are
based on logic, data, and instinct. This
requires us to use tools beyond technology.
You can't learn to be an effective communicator if you're only
communicating with a computer. You can't
learn to have a high level of social intelligence if you're looking at your
screen for long periods of time. The
traditional teaching methods of classroom discussion and small group work are
much more effective in teaching people how to connect with other people, to
care about what other people think and feel, than technology does. So to me, this particular challenge is one of
going beyond just using technology. Technology is sexy, attractive, and popular
but not necessarily the best way to give all education.
Finally they discussed increased privacy concerns. They say that school leaders want to use data
to improve learning outcomes but parents are apprehensive and suspicious about
collecting data from K-12 students. Of
course, the parents are not apprehensive and suspicious about their school
collecting, analyzing, and using data in house.
The problem is that there is a big push to use big data firms. In order to try to keep student information
unique to that student, the large data firms rely on student identifiers such
as Social Security numbers, ID numbers, and names when this data is out on the
Web. Recent events, like the IRS records being hacked, should have taught us
that any information held in the cloud or on the web is hackable. Student data
should not be on the hackable cloud or web-based technology. The only way to make it un-hackable is to
have it not connected and I think the parents’ concerns are very valid. If people's personal information is in other
people's hands when they are five years old, it could haunt them for their entire
lives. It could be used prevent them
from getting job opportunities, ruining their political ambitions 40 years from
now, not to mention of course ruining them financially. It’s just insane to think that student data
should be in the cloud and on the web. There
should be sufficient time for this data to be looked at in house, stored in
house, not on a network. If we have to
go back to the old teacher gradebook, then let's go back to paper as an old
paper grade book can be easily destroyed while electronic records and ones on
the web are difficult, if not impossible, to destroy.
Next, I looked at Joyce
Valenza’s Top Tech Trends, where I looked at the expanded version with
infographic. The infographic was difficult for me to read; I guess it's too
small. She talks about social media, that if it is blocked in your district or school,
you should get it unblocked. I don't know how she expects that to happen. If you have parental support to unblock it, perhaps
it would work, but frankly I'm not risking my job just to see that 10 year old
elementary school children can go on Twitter and Facebook. It's just not that important to their
education.
Number two is transparency is the new platform. It is about using things like Google classroom
to collaborate more with our students and teaching. Again, the lack of appropriate technology and
broadband service affects the ability to use these products.
I know that whoever is reading this has heard many times
before but the technology at my school is terrible. My computers were all cast offs from the state
years ago. Our laptop cart is does not
have enough laptops on it anymore to serve an entire class and many of the keys
are broken. We do have a set of Chrome books,
which are reasonably usable for upper grades, but try to put an entire class of
first graders on Chrome books and the first 20 minutes will be spent trying to
get the students logged on. This results
in a severe loss of teaching time.
Valenza talked about crowdsourcing and crowdfunding which I
have tried on DonorsChoose. Perhaps I
didn't write a sexy enough project, but I ended up giving half the money myself
so that I could get the half that was donated by an anonymous donor. These
sites ask that you send photographs of the students using the materials that
were purchased for the project, but I had a very difficult time getting parents
to agree to let me use their kid’s photos on a web based site. It maybe just my community but they're very
afraid of what those pictures were going to be used for. In the end, I only got parents to agree that photos
of their kids could be taken with them looking down or away from the
camera. Crowdsourcing seems like an unrealistic
way to fund our public schools. Do we really want to put the funding of our
public schools to the whims of crowdfunding so the sexiest project with the
prettiest children is funded instead of effective data driven projects in
schools with the greatest needs?
Number 5 is the 1:1 model or mobile device is the new computer
lab. It is great if you or the community
has the money to go to 1:1. We don't
even have the money to allow each teacher have their own computer. The average classroom teacher does not have a
computer that is dedicated to their use and all the computers are both students
and teacher use. In the high school with
the rooms being shared, that problem is much greater than in elementary school.
Joyce Valenza says that librarians musts curate for mobile
as well as desktop devices and scout out the best the emerging mobile tools. Well, I have an Android phone. I can
investigate Android apps, but we don't have any Android tablets in the school
district. We also don't have any I-pads
unless the teachers are using their own.
There are not a lot of mobile apps being used in our school.
I do like online professional development opportunities such
as this one, and I think that they are an important trend, but again for some of
our teachers the lack of broadband service makes even this type of project
difficult if not impossible. One of the
teachers in my school, who used to participate in cool tools, moved further out
in Schoharie County and she doesn't have sufficient bandwidth at home to
participate and her family situation is such that she can't stay at school
until 5 or 6 o'clock at night. Therefore
she's just not participating this year but she is so interested that she is
hoping that I will share everything with her.
Regarding the discussion about the maker movement, I think it
is a great one. I do have some of the more traditional maker movement supplies
available in my library. The tech person that we used to have did let
students take apart computers to see how they work. The demands of the school day are increasing,
making the free time that the students have smaller and smaller and smaller. Our sixth graders no longer have any recess.
If they participate in band and choir and are in a regular foreign language,
they generally do not have any study hall time whatsoever. They tend to be in the library when they can
convince their reading teacher to let them come down and get books in between
the times when one of their classroom teachers is doing a project in the
library. The current testing and APPR
standards are such that teachers, in general, are now scared, so free time is disappearing.
Even 10 years ago, it would have been a fantastic idea, but the time and money
to back it isn't there like it was 10 years ago.
I, also looked at 10
technologies that will change the world in the next ten years and What Does the Next-Generation School
Library Look Like? The 10
technologies article just re-emphasized the haves versus the have-nots to
me. It also made me question the efforts
to end global warming when one man thinks that it is okay, and perhaps even
admirable, to have 38 always-on connections and more than 50 Mbps of bandwidth. Think about how much just that one man is
contributing to the global warming and the land-fill crisis! It boggles the mind. The author also says that by 2035 (20 years,
mind you) “robots could completely replace humans in the workforce.” All I can say is GOD FORBID. The author must be young and naïve. I’m still not driving the flying car that the
Jetsons promised me, nor are we wearing the disposable paper clothes that my
sister was taught we would be wearing. I’m
sure that I will see huge technological jumps in the rest of my lifetime, like
I went from my first computer, a Commodore Vic-20, which used a cassette tape
for storage to my Samsung Galaxy Note 3 that has more power than a thousand
Vic-20s! But robots taking over the
workforce will take a LOT longer than 20 years.
And, when and if, they do take over, it will probably be the end of the
human race, as Isaac Asimov predicted in his mysteries. As we isolate ourselves more and more and we
eliminate our purpose for living, life will become meaningless. The future that Julie Borst predicts is grim
indeed.
Regarding the Next-Generation library, I fully
understand the difference between the noise of engagement and the noise of socializing
and making noise for the sake of making noise.
My library is not always quiet.
However, I try to teach my students that they need to think about people
other than themselves and act accordingly.
There may be others making up tests in the library, trying to study for
a test, trying to put the finishing touches on their report or essay, or trying
to finish the chapter of the fantastic book that they are reading before recess
is over, not to mention autistic children who cannot tolerate a lot of noise. All student needs should be considered, not
simply the students that will make your library look busy.
Everyone agrees that the ability to use technology will be the
key for the future success of all students.
The largest obstacle to success in our school is inadequate broadband
service to many geographical areas. Also
the high cost of technology and its rapid obsolescence creates major issues for
families, schools, and their teachers. Because
of the huge demands being made on teaching other subjects, it will be necessary
for teachers to develop ways to incorporate it in the other curriculum. Politically, schools need parents, private
corporations, and government to recognize the obstacle that a lack of broadband
service and the high cost of maintaining adequate technology present to much of
America, especially when schools are operating under a 2% tax cap!
