Hammers and Nails
Millions of classroom computers, most connected to world-wide networks, with a variety of amazing communications tools should have brought about major alterations to our process of teaching and learning.
Tim of Assorted Stuff writes about the application of a Seth Godin idea in education. I like the angle.
If we didn’t just use them as digital versions of the same analog tools we’ve always used. We want laptops to be electronic textbooks or workbooks.
While I think there are definite benefits to digital text over printed text, this isn’t enough according to Tim. He goes on, with other technologies, too, such as the seemingly ubiquitously arriving IWBs:
Expensive interactive whiteboards are too often used for one-way transmission of knowledge, in very much the same way as the traditional analog chalk version.
As schools in Virginia face cuts for next school year, its inevitable that we’ll be banking on our creativity and doing more with less. It’s not just doing less with less, but really more with less. Some schools may succeed, but many will probably fail. When you have less and you have folks who are inspired to make positive change, there is the opportunity for creative solutions.
I can’t say I’m all optimistic, however.
I am both young enough to sometimes be naive and old enough to know change happens slowly. So I don’t see the mass digitization of curriculum as a bad thing. I see printing tons of paper and hole-punching it into binders bad, but a digital worksheet? An electronic textbook? An interactive white board? These are all transitional stages to better ways of teaching.
Patience is sometimes a difficult pill to swallow. I feel it too.
I came from a meeting of local tech directors last week where one re-told a story of a parent who shared at a community meeting: “I don’t want our teachers to be guides on the side, I want the sage on that stage and giving notes to my son who will copy them down and become educated! It works!”
Tim is sometimes critical of the overly large school division where he is employed, and in my line of work I see everyone–all stakeholders–often willing to blame anyone else about the problems. I do it too. Federal government. State government. It’s the parents. It’s the students who don’t care. It’s the teachers unwilling to change. It’s the administrators who are complacent.
The problem I see is that we don’t have a clear, American-made model that is really working that we can use as an example. We have some successful charter schools, we have KIPP schools, we have some variety and some success if you look hard enough. But show me a model that’s clearly better, clearly more successful that takes place in public school. You often have to go outside our very country.
That’s a huge barrier to all those stakeholders.
A different country is different politics; it’s different parents, different expectations, different teachers, different teacher colleges.
So how do we move from small baby steps with something like interactive white boards into the friction of innovation?
I don’t have those answers. I am not sure Tim or Seth have them either, to be honest. But I’m content to see the positives these technologies, for one, can bring.
- Until our teachers are prepared to teach without textbooks, don’t be too hard on a willingness to do away with digital texts.
- Until our elementary teachers are engaging students with digital interactive models throughout the day in a 1:1 environment or via portable, hand-held devices that can truly personalize learning, don’t be so hard on the teacher with the IWB.
- When the administration dreams about how to make better all the resources they’ve amassed in a digital, searchable format, don’t rain on the parade.
I see all of these things as steps towards making school experiences:
- more diverse,
- more authentic,
- more digital,
- and more meaningful.
Economic change, in fact, will cause us to look for “new opportunities to grow”. Talking about it, discussing it, sharing it, and thinking about it… is hopefully a positive catalyst for the change(s) we need.