Every Second:

• Blogs: 17 new posts published

Every Minute:

• Twitter: 25,000 updates tweeted
• Flickr: 4836 images shared
• YouTube: 20 hours of video uploaded

Every Day:

• Facebook: 600,000 new users
  
• Wikipedia: 1923 articles added
• Words: 14 new English words invented
• Google: 299 million searches performed
• Text Messages: 2.5 billion sent in the United States

Granted, these statistics, which I readily admit are rough at best, cannot universally be viewed as valid additions to our collective knowledge; much of social media (and perhaps this post) could be considered digital refuse.  However, I do believe they speak to my long-standing contention that (1) we cannot ignore these explosive trends and (2) the classic notion of the 3 Rs as the foundation of curriculum is no longer adequate.

Information Overload or Filter Failure?

Technologist Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, noted last fall at the Web 2.0 Expo NY that  information overload isn’t the problem the media makes it out to be: it’s really a failure of information filters:

Whether you agree with Shirky’s assertions or not, the fact remains that information, which is often interpreted as knowledge, is expanding exponentially.  How, then, can a contemporary curriculum include (or at the very least leverage) the absolute best parts of this global, swelling compendium?  And to what extent should we even attempt to do so?  I don’t believe there is an easy answer, but  modern curriculum, whether it be approached as a product, a process, or a praxis, needs to consider not only the transmission of knowledge but the nature and value of the knowledge itself.  Simply put, we need to rethink what we teach.

The 3 Rs and the 3 Ss

Some may argue that the aforementioned statistics, staggering through they be, have no bearing on curriculum; status updates, home videos, and trendy terms are simply irrelevant within the context of the 3 Rs.   Reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic, however, while vitally important, are collectively insufficient and have been for quite some time.  In 1993, Seymour Papert wrote a short but thought-provoking article for Wired Magazine, Obsolete Skill Set: The 3 Rs—Literacy and Letteracy in the Media Ages, that challenged the fundamental concept of literacy.  As he noted,

The facetious old turn of phrase that identifies schooling with the three Rs — reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic — may express the most obstinate block to change in education. The central role of these “basics” is never discussed; it is considered obvious. Thus the most important consequences of new technologies are not recognized by education policy-makers.

The role of the Rs in elementary education used to be beyond question. How effectively could one teach geography, history, and science to students who could not read? Looking back, we cannot seriously fault these arguments — within their historical context.

But looking forward, we can formulate new arguments beyond the imagination of 19th century thinkers, who could hardly have conjured images of media that would provide modes of accessing and manipulating knowledge radically different than those offered by the Rs. Nor could they have formulated what I see as the deep difference between education past and future: In the past, education adapted the mind to a very restricted set of available media; in the future, it will adapt media to serve the needs and tastes of each individual mind.

Papert may have been ahead of his time, but I believe his views are more relevant now than ever.  The 3 Rs, while not obsolete, are no longer the benchmark for basic literacy and consequently should not be the sole basis for structuring curriculum.  In addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic, students today must be adept at managing the deluge of knowledge/information available and develop mastery of the 3 Ss: sifting, synthesizing, and sharing.

Within the stream of endless tweets, posts, articles, and SMS messages lies a wealth of knowledge, and sifting through the vastness of this information-rich world, synthesizing these myriad ideas into manageable forms, and sharing their meaning with others have become essential skills.  Consequently, curriculum should not only be coherent, spiral around “big ideas,” include essential questions, and employ core assessments, it should ultimately reflect the influence and opportunities of modern technology.  In that environment, technology moves from the role of simply being integrated to that of being integral; what a change that would be.

Using Moodle as a delivery platform, each of our grade-level teams designed a 10 day instructional unit centered on a broad theme.  Recognizing that ill students will have difficulty following a prescribed timeline  and should not be expected to carry the same workload they would if healthy, the units represent approximately 10 hours of learning activities that can be completed on a  fairly flexible schedule.  Although only our students can enroll in the Moodle courses, guests can preview and explore each of the units:

5th Grade: Leadership

PeaceJam is an international education program built around leading Nobel Peace Laureates with the goal to inspire a new generation of peacemakers who will transform the world.  Using their work as a foundation, the 5th Grade Leadership Unit includes 12 activities that encourage students to begin thinking about themselves as leaders who can embody our school’s motto of “Changing Lives, Changing the World.”

6th Grade: Discover St. Louis

The 6th Grade St. Louis Unit provides students the chance to virtually explore different aspect of the St. Louis community.  From favorite local foods to famous celebrities on our Walk of Fame, the activities help students understand and appreciate The Gateway City.

7th Grade: The World In and Around Your Home

From the bedroom to the backyard, your home is filled with opportunities to learn and apply math, science, languages, and everything else studied in school. The 7th Grade Your World Unit explores the world in and around your home through the lens of academic classes.

8th Grade: Music All Around

There are numerous ways to look at music;  historically, as a scientist, as a mathematician, as an artist, and simply as a human being. The 8th Grade Music Unit engages students on the topic from these and other perspectives.

The infusion of technology into these units is rich and varied.  Collectively, our students will have opportunities to read and respond to blog posts, complete and analyze surveys, collaborate on project wikis, ask and answer questions in a forum, compose and share music, create multimedia presentations, submit work electronically, use Wimba Voice to capture audio responses, and participate in real-time learning activities using DyKnow and Wimba Classroom.

Hopefully our community will be spared from a flu outbreak, but if we should need to close, we are prepared.  And if our luck should hold we are excited about using these units at the end of year.  Either way, these established and emerging tools are helping us make sure that learning never stops.

Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere. We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs. The low end has never been riding higher.

The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they’re actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as “high-quality.”

To some, it looks like the crapification of everything. But it’s really an improvement. And businesses need to get used to it, because the Good Enough revolution has only just begun.

The crapification of everything IS an improvement, and education needs to get used to it too.  When used purposefully, cheap, fast, and simple tools can facilitate nothing short of a learning revolution.

This idea, of course, is nothing new; the OLPC Project traces it origins back more than 40 years to Seymour Papert and the LOGO programming language.  Apple Computer introduced what is widely regarded as the first consumer-level digital camera in 1994.  A few years later, VoIP, which is now available even in gaming systems, arrived in the form of the Vocaltec’s Internet Phone.  So why haven’t more of these tools appeared in schools and/or made a greater impact on education?  The short answer is that many teachers are not aware of the teaching-learning potential.

There are far more tools, tips, and techniques available to share than could fit in this space, but if you haven’t yet joined the revolution, I would encourage you to explore a few simple resources that can get you started:

• VoIP allows for free audio and video calls over the Internet.  Of the many VoIP options available, Skype is perhaps the best known.  The Skype in Schools resource page is filled with ideas for making learning come alive for students.
• Netbooks are small, inexpensive (most cost less than $400) mobile computers that account for nearly 20% of the overall PC notebook market.  Although they are not suited for running  high-powered applications, their price point can’t be beat.  The Netbook Buyers Guide can help you find the netbook best suited for your organization.
• Digital Media tools are now pocket sized and nearly ubiquitous.  The Handbook on Digital Video and Audio in Education is a very thorough resource for understanding how to effectively incorporate digital media into the curriculum.

The real power of simplified technology is that it can be mastered and manipulated with relative ease; students can literally bend it to their will (and your learning objectives).  When given the power to connect, create, and share, “good enough” becomes truly great; not bad for crappy technology.

I’m not so sure about that.

For this assignment, my son could choose to complete either three, five, or seven activities corresponding to “grades” of good, great, and grand respectively from a list of 12 possible options.  Acutely aware at age nine that more = better, he opted to tackle the following seven exercises:

• Construct a model of a Mississippi riverboat using a shoebox.
• Visit a local department store, read the labels on clothing and home furnishings, and make a list of ten things made from cotton.
• Make a chart that lists the capital cities of each southeast state, each city’s population, the year it became the capital, and the number of senators and representatives serving in each state’s legislature.
• Choose a southeast state.  On poster board, illustrate and label one mammal, reptile, bird, fish, and amphibian that is native to the state.  Write one fact about each animal below its illustration.
• Make a pictograph of the yearly peanut production in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and Virgina using the scale 1 peanut = 100,000 short tons.
• Cut pictures of textile products from magazines and create a collage.
• Produce a television commercial for a beach resort in the southeast.

These “fun and educationally sound projects” became something of a family affair that required a considerable investment of time and small measure of money.  As such, when we finally finished the seventh and final activity this afternoon, I felt it prudent to ask him what he had learned from each of the exercises.  Here are his initial, unedited responses:

• Shoebox Riverboat: The cheap spray paint you got was crappy; next time buy the good stuff.
• Cotton List: Most clothes are not made in the USA.
• State Demographics: Do I have to remember all those numbers?
• Animal Poster: Florida has some pretty boring animals.
• Textile Collage: Sports Illustrated doesn’t have a lot of pictures of clothes.
• Peanut Pictograph: Peanuts can have one, two, or three nuts in the shell.
• Television Commercial: It’s important to smile when doing a commercial.

His remarks, albeit brief, clearly had very little to do with the history, geography, politics, economy, or culture of the southeast; the activities did not engage his mind on the topic of study.  Dissatisfied with his comments, we talked further about the projects and reviewed some of the skills he had utilized in completing the assignment.  His second attempt at reflection was a bit more encouraging:

• Shoebox Riverboat: Flickr is a good place to find pictures on the Internet.
• Cotton List: Google Earth can show me where those countries are that make our clothes.
• State Demographics: Government websites are good for getting information about states.
• Animal Poster: Google Image search is another good place to find pictures online.
• Textile Collage: Dictionary.com can tell you the definition of words you don’t understand, like textile.
• Peanut Pictograph: Excel is handy for converting pounds to short tons.
• Television Commercial: Editing video is pretty easy and my sister and I now I have a video on YouTube!

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I don’t know what grand will translate to in the teacher’s gradebook, but I suspect that a brightly painted boat, neatly organized pictograph, a simple but pleasant commercial, and the rest of his creations  will earn him an “A” regardless of whether or not he actually learning anything about the southeast.  After all, there were no learning objectives or assessment rubrics included with the assignment.  The skills that I made a point of introducing/reinforcing with him will, I suspect, go largely ignored.  Even worse, many of these projects, if done without the supervision of a conscientious adult, could actually instill some very bad habits; none of the exercises that involved research required students to cite their sources.

As a former science teacher, I’m all for “hands-on” learning but it must be “minds-on” as well, and the onus for making an activity educationally meaningful should not be left to parents.  While I enjoyed spending time with my son and seeing his mind at work (he is far more visually creative than I ever realized), I fear that the ultimate take-away for many families will be that good craft skills yield high academic marks; talent with a paintbrush or hot glue gun should not define learning.

That said, and on behalf of my son’s fourth grade class, I would ask those teachers who use pre-made materials that “save time and enrich the classroom experience” to please reconsider the value of assigning dioramas, copy-paste research, and poster board displays.  While there may be value in those activities, it won’t be realized at the typical kitchen table.  Dig deeply into topics of importance, incorporate practical skills into the teaching of content, and don’t equate quantity and quality.

In short, think less about students’ hands, and more about their minds.

Twelve months, 100 posts, and several professional development sessions later, I’m not sure much has changed.

In May, Alec Couros visited campus and spoke about Networked Possibilities.  During his presentation, he asked his Twitter network to say hello and the response was overwhelming.  Not counting myself, there are only three teachers in the Middle School currently using Twitter.

In June, we officially adopted Delicious as our only supported tool for bookmarking and helped every teacher create an account.  In working with faculty since the start of school, I’ve found that less than 25% are still tagging sites instead of saving them locally.  Similarly, although we’ve provided several training sessions on Google Reader, less than 10% of teachers subscribe to any RSS feeds.

In July, Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis conducted a workshop here geared toward “flattening classrooms.”  Teachers were shown many PLN resources and even joined a Ning network. Today, only one teacher in my building is actively using Ning.

Lest I sound critical of my colleagues, their hesitation to embrace these resources and establish a PLN is not unique.  I recently and informally polled my PLN and asked for a percentage estimate of teachers/administrators in their schools who’ve created and maintained an electronic personal learning network; responses were overwhelmingly in the low single-digits.

David Warlick, Karl Fisch,  Will Richardson, and others have repeatedly and extensively addressed the importance of the personal learning network, reaching tens (if not hundredes) of thousands of educators.  So why hasn’t the PLN concept gained greater traction?

It’s not a question of willingness, it’s a question of need, or lack thereof.

If one’s classroom/building/district environment is such that the knowledge and skills of a PLN are not required to meet everyday challenges, then there is very little impetus to form a PLN.  If a prescribed curriculum guide, textbook, resource binder, and teacher evaluation rubric are the basis for curriculum and instruction, there is very little need for a PLN. If synchronous, face-to-face, large group instruction is the preferred method of professional development, there is very little need for a PLN.  If the perceived needs of learners can be meet by internal, self-referent means, there is very little need for a PLN.

Those who advocate for personal learning network should continue extolling their virtues, but large-scale  buy-in will not occur until the PLN becomes an essential, vital, “must have” component for professional educators.  And for that to occur, we need to collectively rethink curriculum and instruction, professional development, and the needs of our students in light of the demands of an unknown future.

That’s a mighty big job; good thing I have a PLN to help me.

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At the risk of gross oversimplification, Disrupting Class can be distilled to the ideas that students need to be intrinsically motivated, schooling should be customized to match learning styles, and technology, which to date has not improved learning will, if deployed disruptively, allow students to maximize their individual potential. As they summarize the issue on their website,

“The biggest problem in the current education system is that not every student learns in the same, standard way, and yet schools standardize the way they teach and test. Using the computer as the delivery platform for learning has the potential to break the trade-offs between customization and affordability, which could ultimately allow students to learn in their preferred styles and at their preferred pace.

But another problem is that the huge investment in computers in schools over the past couple decades has delivered so little. The theory of disruption explains how computers can make the meaningful impact we describe above. They must be implemented disruptively by targeting at the outset areas where the alternative to computer-based instruction is nothing at all. Additionally, software makers will need to customize their offerings for different kinds of learners, because right now the programs that come out tend to be similar to the mainstream teaching methods.

And for all this to happen, there is another problem that must be addressed. The current business system is aligned to push down standardized textbooks and curricula; it’s not well suited to bringing in customized software solutions. A new business system must emerge to replace the current one so that students, parents, and teachers can all pull computer-based learning into the mainstream classrooms.”

Christensen envisions this disruption occurring in two stages.  The first stage, termed computer-based learning, utilizes software as a platform for learning in places and for courses where there are no teachers to teach.  The second and significantly more advanced phase, described as student-centric technology, requires the development of software that enables students to learn each subject in manners consistent with their type of intelligence and learning style.  While these stages and the notion of “disruptive innovation” are certainly enticing, they are not the panacea for modern education as some have asserted.

Computer-based Learning: Better than the Alternative?

The use of computer-based learning (specifically online courses) can, in a limited fashion, meet the needs of students who are constrained by their school’s curriculum.  However, a virtual environment is no substitute for a real-world learning experience.  Consider the Virtual ChemLab, which Disrupting Class describes as “infinitely better than many students’ alternative–which is nothing at all.”

While the site is certainly comprehensive, will “learning” chemistry through photographs, video clips, and virtual labware produce students who can think scientifically?  Can higher-order skills and processes be addressed and assessed through an interactive lesson?  Science is fraught with misconceptions and as John Bruer and others can attest, these can be very hard to correct in any setting.  Do the opportunities and benefits afforded by computer-based learning truly outweigh the risk of propagating low-level and potentially faulty knowledge?

This is not to say that computer-based learning is inherently bad, but it isn’t inherently superior to face-to-face instruction, even in a “monolithic” classroom.  To suggest otherwise, as the authors have done, negates the impact of the classroom teacher who, as Robert Marzano notes, has a  direct and major influence on learning.  An online alternative may be better than no alternative, but its limitations must be acknowledged.  Just as Microsoft’s Flight Simulator won’t prepare one for the rigors of actual flight, pointing and clicking reagents won’t unlock the complex relationships between matter and energy.

Student-centric Technology:

Student-centric technology, manifested as hardware and software that can tailor instruction to a particular student’s learning style, is at first glance an exciting concept.  In Christensen’s scenario, at some point in the not-to-distant future, non-programmers (i.e. students, teachers, parents, etc.) will be able to create and distribute modular, computerized “tutorials” on any number of topics.  In this new network of user-generated content, people will ultimately have the ability to “assemble [tutorials] together into entire courses whose approach is truly student-centric—custom-configured to each different type of learner.”

Pieces of this vision already exist thanks to the advent of Web 2.0, and it is true that we often learn better when we teach than when we listen to a teacher.  The issue of expertise, however, must be considered in this new student-centric model.  In How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice, M. Suzanne Donovan, John D. Bransford, and James W. Pellegrino make the following observations regarding novice and expert learners:

• Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices.
• Experts have acquired a great deal of content knowledge that is organized, and their organization of information reflects a deep understanding of the subject matter.
• Experts’ knowledge cannot be reduced to sets of isolated facts or propositions but, instead reflects contexts of applicability, i.e., it is “conditionalized.”
• Experts are able to retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little additional effort.

While a novice may be able to construct a tutorial that benefits others with his/her dominant learning style (we’ve all encountered situations where a student was able to reach someone we could not), there are limits to what a novice can provide.  And while a teacher, the expert learner, can facilitate deeper understanding when working with students, the teaching-learning process could become more difficult as a result of novices selecting and learning from content created by non-experts.

A Missed Opportunity

The two points I’ve briefly illustrated here should not detract from the overall message of Disrupting Class or the many good ideas it contains; change is necessary if we are to prepare our students for an unknown future.  Disruptive innovation in the form of technology, however, is not the answer.  The stages/shifts that Christensen, Johnson, and Horn outline reinforce traditional course offerings with low-level knowledge and skills, largely place responsibility for the teaching-learning process in the hands of the students, and present technology as the solution to education’s shortcomings.  That approach is not a road map for the 21st century.

Education needs to become more individualized and student-centric, but the authors missed a terrific opportunity to emphasize how technology can facilitate those processes within a realistic, sustainable system.  Curriculum and instruction must evolve to include new skills and literacies that can only be acquired through the use of technology.  Online classes and user-generated tutorials will not revolutionize learning; real innovation will occur when we as a profession finally connect technology and pedagogy.

• OneNote: An Electronic Notebook
• Website Evaluation: Be a Critical Consumer
• Delicious: Social Bookmarking
• Effective Search Strategies: Keywords are Key
• Effective Search Strategies: Alternative Search Engines
• Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons: Rights and Responsibilities
• Photoshop Elements: Basic Image Editing
• Flickr: Photo Sharing Made Easy

As I stressed at the beginning of the year, a single course that meets eight times will not make anyone “literate” in the contemporary, digital sense.  Hopefully it was a good springboard, however, for utilizing these tools/techniques in the classroom and building our collective knowledge and skills.

Because this course was new and in direct response to our 1:1 Tablet PC initiative, students and faculty completed an end-of-course survey.  The results provide some keen insight into how well “Digital Literacy” met the learners’ needs and raise a few questions concerning how best to proceed in future years.  Eventually the complete survey will be shared internally, but for now here are a few of the key points I gleaned from the feedback.

Students Enjoy Adult Interaction

One unique aspect of this course was that the 7th grade faculty attended class with the students.  While I had hoped to establish a true culture of collaborative learners, the degree of student-teacher interaction was quite uneven.  Some sections were very participatory while in others it felt as though I were teaching two separate classes/groups simultaneously.  Survey comments indicated that the students enjoyed learning alongside their teachers when they could interact with them.

7th Graders CAN Be Organized

Anyone who has worked with adolescents (and boys in particular) knows that organization can be a challenge.  Colored tab dividers and multiple spiral notebooks are unmanageable for many of our students.  However, our shift to using OneNote for notetaking, iFolder for file storage and backup, and Interact for submitting and retreiving homework has helped more than 90% of our students feel better organized and in control of their learning resources.  Hearing students exclaim, “I like taking notes and can find all my stuff” is a rewarding (and previously unique) experience.

Online Texts Need to Evolve

While OneNote, iFolder, and Interact received near unanimous endorsements, opinions on online textbooks varied.  When asked if electronic textbooks were as good as or better than traditional books, students exhibited a range of responses:

Some e-texts are simply PDF versions of the hardcopy text while others include helpful links and multi-media.  Electronic texts will need to evolve toward the latter if they wish to be embraced by students and faculty.

Not Everyone is a Digital Native

Although we like to generalize that today’s students are indeed “Digital Natives” as Marc Prensky describes, we must acknowledge that this axiom is not applicable to all.  A small but vocal percentage of our students are not enamored and/or fluent with technology and would prefer, as one stated, “if computers would just go away and we could use pencil and paper again.”  While I don’t foresee that happening here any time soon, we should make an effort to identify and support those who, despite their age, are “Digital Immigrants” like ourselves.

Back to the Classroom

With rare exception, students and faculty felt the Digital Literacy course was a good addition to our curriculum and should be offered again next year.  While I am happy to assume that teaching responsibility, for the course to truly be effective requires that the themes I present find their way into other classrooms.  Learning to search effectively, evaluate websites, cite sources, manipulate images, and all the other skills take time and a meaningful connection to content to master.

Hopefully at some point in the not too distant future we’ll have outgrown the need for a Digital Literacy course because it will become part of the fabric of our curriculum.  For that to occur means that although the trimester has ended, the learning must continue.  Class, as they say, is dismissed…but certainly not over.

• Reveal deep and important understandings
  • Core Performance Assessment
• Provide information about what students know about the topic
  • Short answer quizzes and tests, guided response, timelines, self-assessments, products in response to prompts
• Provide students with an opportunity to demonstrate the skills relative to the topic
  • Public performance, documenting of performance, formal observations or interviews

While the first two points are easy to embrace, the third is a bit more challenging.  Assessments that measure skills can be difficult to design and time consuming to implement.  Consequently, these types of assessments are frequently missing in the typical classroom, and ultimately that disadvantages our students.

The Need for 21st Century Skills

Although the UBD session referred to “skills” in the general sense, it should not be a stretch to assume that skills today also include what have been termed “21st century skills.”  We have addressed that concept before and are currently in the process of defining/refining what constitutes a contemporary educational skillset.  While the definition of 21st century skills is somewhat ambiguous, the need to equip students for the challenges of the digital age is unequivocal.

Whether it’s testing data from TIMSS or PISA, writings from Tony Wagner, Thomas Friedman, or Daniel Pink, or observations from within our own profession, all signs indicate that (1) a strong foundation in basic skills is no longer sufficient and (2) we are falling behind other countries in addressing the issue.  Our hesitation to change our practice can partly be explained by the difficulty in measuring these skills.  Difficult, however, does not mean impossible.

Measuring Skills for the 21st Century

This week Education Sector’s Elena Silva published Measuring Skills for the 21st Century.  Silva’s work provides a good overview of the need to teach complex thinking skills, examines several models for articulating 21st century skills,  and explores new assessments that can provide students those much-needed opportunities to “demonstrate the skills relative to the topic.”  As Silva states in her report:

“New assessments … illustrate that the skills that really matter for the 21st century—the ability to think creatively and to evaluate and analyze information—can be measured accurately and in a common and comparable way. These emergent models also demonstrate the potential to measure these complex thinking skills at the same time that we measure a student’s mastery of core content or basic skills and knowledge. There is, then, no need for more tests to measure advanced skills. Rather, there is a need for better tests that measure more of the skills students’ need to succeed today.”

In light of our work with UBD and on-going conversations regarding curriculum and instruction, I would highly encourage you to read the full text of Silva’s article and visit the Discussion Forum for more information.  With time, patience, effort and understanding we can meet our students’ needs, both immediate and long term.

Before we start charging forward, however, it’s important to stop and consider the concept of direction as it relates to the process of navigation.  Consider the near ubiquitous GPS device: provided the user knows where he/she wants to go, the GPS unit can use 3-D Trilateration to determine the starting position, the final destination, and the most direct path between the two.  Thanks to satellites, the days of dead reckoning geophysical navigation are over.

When it comes comes to educational change, there are no geosynchronous beacons to guide us, but that does not mean we cannot chart an informed course.  Just as the GPS device relies on known reference points, we too must use external markers to decide which “direction” will lead us to our goal.  Thanks to research and networked learning, the days of self-referent intellectual navigation are over as well.

The Starting Point

Just as a GPS unit must determine one’s starting point before plotting a path, teachers and administrators must begin their journey toward 21st century education by developing an understanding of their students’ needs.  Every school is in a slightly different place, but all our students share a common experience; they are digital learners contending with analog classrooms.  To get a sense of what this means, A Vision of K-12 Students Today should provide some insight:

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Acknowledging that students today are different and that we need to adjust our instructional practices is the first step in moving forward…but moving forward to where?  What knowledge, skills, and expertise will they need in this unknown future?  There are no crystal balls, but there are some indicators that can help define the final destination.

The Final Destination

No one can predict exactly what our students will need to know and be able to do once they leave our care, but some good thinking from several prominent organizations has done much to address the issue.  The 21st Century Skills from NCREL/Metiri, the National Educational Technology Standards from ISTE, and the Framework for 21st Century Learning (shown below) from The Partnership for 21st Century Skills provide a solid and comprehensive framework for our final, if rather fluid, destination.

It’s important that we don’t let the uncertainty of this moving target diminish our desire to move in this “direction”.  Reaching this destination will require some reference points along the way and the ability to change course as needed.

Reference Points for the Journey

Once we have an understanding of where we are and where our students need to be, the real work begins; the journey itself.  Accurate navigation requires solid reference points, and the more the better.  With respect to curriculum development, we are looking to Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding By Design for guidance. For classroom instruction,  we have adopted Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching as our benchmark.

In addition to these pedagogical landmarks, we also need to consider the standards and recommendations regarding our respective content areas.  Every major professional organization has developed some position statement and/or guidelines regarding 21st century education, including the Definition of 21st Century Literacies from NCTE and The Technology Principle from NCTM, and we need to be mindful of these as we navigate forward.

Coordinating all the Coordinates

Although it may seem simplistic to compare charting a course for a geographical destination to that of determining a direction for modern education, the processes are not all that unalike.  The key to each is to know where you are, where you want to be, and having sufficient points of reference to guide your journey.  Consumer-grade GPS technology can determine your location and suggest a route using only three satellites; given the abundant resources at our disposal, surely we can steer our classrooms in the right direction.

“The tech revolution at the nation’s top law and business schools, where students now routinely use laptops and wireless connections in class, has created an insurgent population: professors, who believe they’re losing the fight against wandering minds. In retaliation, at schools such as Harvard, Yale and Columbia, some profs have banned laptops from class altogether. In a more measured approach, the University of Chicago Law School cut its classroom Wi-Fi signal this spring, citing an “epidemic” of Web browsing during lectures, while at UCLA law, profs can activate a “kill switch” to disable Wi-Fi if they sense an attention deficit. The results, they say, are striking. “I’m getting much better eye contact,” says Michigan law professor Richard Friedman, who installed a no-laptop policy in January. “It’s been like renewing an acquaintance with an old friend.” To others, though, the crackdown lets the real culprits off the hook. “If you’re so boring that students are zoning out, you ought to rethink if you should be teaching,” says UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge—though he admits that he’s flipped the kill switch in his own classroom more than once. Tetris, anyone?”

For those resistant to utilizing technology into the classroom, this news may seem a validation; it’s hard to argue with the wisdom of the Ivy League…or law school professors. Kevin Yamamoto, professor of law at the South Texas College of Law, recently published Banning Laptops in the Classroom: Is it Worth the Hassles? in the Journal of Legal Education. In his closing remarks he states:

“The argument seems clear: distractions hurt learning and memory, laptops, if not used properly, create distractions, and therefore improper laptop use should be eliminated. Even proper laptop use may interfere with learning since many students are inclined to type the information presented verbatim and therefore fail to learn as much, learn as deep, or utilize the information flexibly.”

While Yamamoto is correct in that “the argument seems clear”, the issue is not proper or improper student use and boredom, but rather proper or improper instructional planning and engagement. There has been considerable research on the impact of laptop programs, and the schools that have seen positive results, regardless of grade level, have one thing in common: they created learning environments that embraced and leveraged the power of ubiquitous computing. Teaching as though the technology didn’t exist, or viewing the personal computer as nothing more than a notetaking device, is an injustice that, while beyond the scope of the legal system, should be fundamentally intolerable to the educational system.

We don’t have a “kill switch” for our network and I don’t believe we need one. We did not make this institutional decision lightly, and our teachers are fully aware of the challenges and opportunities that await. Granted, there will be times when our students’ attention will drift and they may engage in some casual browsing. When this happens, though, instead of reaching for the “off” button, we need to reach for the “on” button that exists within every child’s mind. Technology, and 1:1 computing in particular, can reshape, support and enhance teaching and learning…at least in middle school.