My Blog of Potential

I’m reviewing our different projects this year to reflect on what really worked well.

First of all, the FlipCams were a big hit.  The teachers who used them said the kids were very enthusiastic about researching and presenting their assignments on film.  They spent more time and effort getting the backgrounds and costuming just right and we think they will remember what they learned in the World Culture unit on India much better because of it.

The Weebly webpages for teachers were another big hit - the teachers who switched to publishing on weebly found that they could very quickly and easily update their webpages, and consequently began using them as a true classroom communication tool instead of an online ‘all about me’ brochure.

One of the best projects I saw was a repeat of one we initiated last year, but with a bit more refinement.  We call it ‘Survivor Math’, and it’s designed for 6th grade math students.  Each student is assigned a future job, told where he or she will live (geographically) and then must research what kind of training or education that job requires and what sort of salary they could expect.  Then they must go to RealityCheck and research what sort of expenses they will have for housing, food, entertainment and so forth.  The students must write a paragraph describing their job and training, and prepare an excel spreadsheet and graph showing their monthly budget.  It was a real eye-opener for the students. My only regret is that we don’t repeat this project again every year between 6th and 12th grade (this spoken as a parent of 4 teen agers who don’t seem to have a clue what it costs to live these days!).

We didn’t get much response to the distance learning opportunities til the very end of the year, but I think the two teachers who did participate were very enthusiastic and are eager to repeat the experience again next year, so some seeds have been sown, and hopefully fell on fertile soil.

Also, over the summer some of us are trying to attend First Lego League training, to have a team participate in the First Lego League challenge next year.  I say trying because right now we are wait-listed, but hopefully we’ll move up the list as summer progresses.

pretty cool - I’ve been nominated in Second Life for the Blog -of-the Month for July.  Here’s the cool image they gave me!

I’m not on SL very often - can only use it from home, but if you happen to see Flatpicken String  on there, that’s me!

I just re-read my post about ‘Moving off Dead Center’ - and I am realizing how negative that sounded.  I am so passionate about integrating technology and using it effectively that I get discouraged when I see us trying to shoe-horn the technology into our present way of doing things, instead of letting the technology transform the way we do things.  But I’m seeing the light at the end of the TAKS tunnel and starting to dream dreams for next year.

What if…

• …I took the laptop cart (15 wireless laptops) to one teacher next year and told her that she could have it every day for six weeks.  How would that immediate daily access transform her teaching?
• …I planned with another teacher to have her bring her kids to the lab every Friday for six weeks straight, to work on a digital storybooking project?  Would the longer duration of the project encourage the kids to revise and improve and edit their projects?  Would they come to the lab on their lunch hours in the interim to make changes on their own?  Would they take ownership and want to continue the project after it was formally concluded?  What if we obtained permission to publish the finished projects online?  I could set up a blog or a website for them to publish.  How would that help them take ownership of their learning?
• …I can get a math teacher to commit to setting up the TI-Navigators in her room and leaving them set up for an entire grading period?  If we started from the viewpoint that we were going to use them every day, how many new ways would we think to use them to graph data, poll the audience, etc?
• …I challenged teachers who really want to learn how to integrate technology, to join a Tech Development PLN?  If we set up a conference area in FirstClass to share ideas, discuss issues, and troubleshoot?

I have teachers who are beginning to see the value of videotaping their lessons for publishing on the web, both for review and to allow students who are absent to access the information.  They are beginning to see how repetitive lectures could be done once and then published, leaving them the freedom to discuss, clarify, and deepen their instruction instead of spending their time presenting the same material over and over.  They’re excited about the idea of having some sessions available to show the kids when they have to be away from class with a sub - so that the kids do not lose instructional time.

I come up behind teachers in the computer lab and see them reading blogs by people like Wes Fryer - that gives me great hope for the future of teaching.

I can tell it’s not time for me to change jobs yet, because I can  still get enthusiastic about ways to better improve this one.

I have been wrestling all week with trying to design a staff development that would teach teachers how to integrate technology into their teaching, and having a hard time.  After all, it took me 36 hours of graduate study to just begin to wrap my brain around all the ways the evolution of computers, technology, and networking has changed the way we communicate and learn, so how am I supposed to get this all across to teachers in a matter of a few hours. Plus add to that the generally uneasy feeling I have that I”m kind of wasting my breath anyway, because until we move away from these stupid TAKS tests that value content knowledge over knowing how to use it, we will continue to cram as much content into students as we can at the expense of allowing time to synthesize, create, and THINK. 

 It finally hit me - we’re still going about this all wrong.  We keep teaching the teachers HOW to use their technology as if that was all that was required.  For example, we hold training after training on how to use various applications and pieces of equipment.  Here’s how to use publisher, here’s how to use Powerpoint, etc. - but somehow if you observe how technology is being used in the classroom, the sad fact is that most of the time we are using compters and the internet like a bigger, faster, flashier instructional television and film of the 50s and 60s.  We stream in United Streaming videos and BrainPop to introduce a lesson and engage students, but then as soon as the video is over, we go right back to having them read text, answer fill in the blanks questions on a worksheet, and then hand them in for a grade - so the main use of the technology is for content delivery.  Seems to me the whole point of the Internet is that it allows communication across vast distances rapidly, so instead of filling in the blanks about India, why don’t we contact students who live in India and find out what are their daily lives like? The power of computers is that they can perform repetitive calculations quickly and accurately, so instead of studying how to manually calculate percentages, why don’t we use a spreadsheet to model what difference it makes if you are paying a credit card off using the minimum monthly payment at 21% interest?  Yes, that’s a messy calculation, but that is what computers are good at doing - and then we can spend more time discussing the really important stuff like how many hours per week you’d have to work at minimum wage to afford to live in a three bedroom apartment and make car payments.  The reason we aren’t preparing students for life in the technology age is that we are using our technology to teach them in the same manner that our parents and grandparents were taught, even though our kids are facing a whole different set of circumstances and challenges.

…if we treated education like a video game?  When you are gaming, you have to Level up your character by completing certain tasks.  If you don’t complete the tasks, you don’t level up.  Our K-12 system right now makes it very punitive if you don’t complete the tasks within a certain very arbitrary time frame - if you try and are unsuccessful, you get ‘failing reports’ , and if you don’t advance by the end of the semester, you are considered ‘retained’ - social akwardness - stigma. In the present system, the assumption is that everyone advances cognitively at the same pace based on calendar age, with no allowance built in for life experiences and innate abilities. We don’t motivate by rewarding success - we try to motivate by instilling fear of failure. That works in the case of approval seeking students, but there is nothing built in to allow you to ‘level up’ faster - so the brighter students tune out fairly quickly. 

A similar pattern in video games harks back to the old Atari classic Asteriods - remember that one?  At first you shoot at the big rocks, only to learn that they turn into more numerous medium rocks, and if you shoot them they turn into even more numerous very little fast rocks that are hard to hit but can kill your ship just the same.  You recognize pretty quickly that at some point there will be more rocks than you can handle, and after once attaining this really high level of success, you walked away to find a more enjoyable, less stressful game.  To further extend the analogy, those of us who played the game for awhile learned that periodically there are ships that come sailing by and shoot at you - the big easy to hit one was not worth much, but the small fast one was worth 1000 points.  Some of us figured out that if you kill all but one little rock at the lowest, slowest level, then wait for those little ships while dodging that little rock, you could rack up really high scores  by ’ship hunting’.  - This is akin to your kids that figure out early on that to the schools it’s all about your scores on the state exams, so they will sit like bumps all year doing minimal participation in your classroom, and wait for the state exam to really kick it into high gear, then walk away retaining no more learning than it took to regurgitate on the TAKS test.  Does this sound like what we do to the kids in K-12 education?  every time they succeed and advance a grade, we reward them by giving them even more ‘medium rocks’ to shoot, ane maybe a few more priveleges, but not enough to be really motivating, and by high school we’re throwing so many ‘little rocks’ at them, that they burn out and explode. We don’t allow them to walk away from the game until they are 18.  Little wonder they mentally ‘walk away’ long before that. 

To contrast, look at role-playing games.  You create a character with varying levels of a number of abilities, and through completion of a variety of tasks and missions, you can improve those abilities to make your character stronger and more successful. In the MMORPGs online, you seek out others to help you develop your skills so your character can gain more levels, more abilities, more ‘goodies’.  I have watched my own kids spend hours, weeks, and even months playing such games with the same character - taking ownership of their character’s successes and helping other kids ‘level up’ their own character.   

What if we made some sort of modified level system in our schools - make the skills (a new code name for our TEKS) publicly posted, have specific privileges available to students as they attain higher levels, allow students to test their skills against the system whenever they think they are ready with no penalty for failure other than having to continue working on it, provide the tools for them to develop those skills, and the teachers to guide them in how to use the tools.  Would the students now take ownership and want to learn those skills? Would teachers find it easier to stay engaged and motivated as they move to sharing what they know instead of having to force feed it to unwilling desk-slaves?

This is actually not as far from out in left field as you might assume.  In the past year I have had to become familiar with some of the strategies employed by the psychiatric profession for dealing with behaviorally challenged kids - and they operate much the same way.  All kids on entering the unit have minimal privileges, and as they successfully corrrect their behavior and choose to comply with expectations and participate in structured learning activities, they earn more and more freedoms.  Seems like we expect our ‘normal’ kids to thrive educationally in a very punitive environment, but we ‘get it’ with our ED kids.  I wonder what our K-12 education success rates would be if we treated all kids in the ‘pull’ rather then the ‘push’ system of rewards and punishments?

Update 1/10/09:  I just found this article by James Paul Gee in which he discusses this exact same concept, only using much better English and providing references.  Guess it wasn’t that original an idea after all (hangs head in shame)