Throughout the course of the morning, our small, diverse, and dedicated group explored some of the pedagogical benefits of wikis (cooperative learning, project-based learning, and authentic assessment), explored a variety of wiki examples that spanned all grade levels and disciplines, experimented with several wiki tools, including Wikispaces, Mediawiki, and PBworks, and discussed strategies for effectively assessing student work. Whether you are new to wikis or simply looking to enhance your skills, all session notes and resources are available here; please use and reuse to your benefit.

The Multitasking Myth

Most teenagers (and many adults) believe themselves to be competent multitaskers, capable of simultaneously emailing-texting-surfing-listening to music-you name it while attending to other tasks such as driving, studying, or even having a conversation.  Stanford professor Clifford Nass has been studying the effectiveness of self-proclaimed multitaskers, and his research confirms the multitasking myth. As he concludes, “It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They get distracted constantly. Their memory is very disorganized. Recent work we’ve done suggests they’re worse at analytic reasoning.  We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.”

These finding are not surprising, but the potential long-term effects are quite disturbing when set against the backdrop of our technology-rich homes and classrooms.  University professors are already seeing the toll that constant, multitasking-driven distraction has taken on writing; students compose paragraphs, not cohesive compositions, because they can’t maintain focus for extended periods of time and see how the parts must relate to the whole.  Write a paragraph; update Facebook status.  Write a second paragraph; check email.  Write the required number of paragraphs; assignment finished.

Unfortunately and despite the research, secondary schools may be encouraging and reinforcing the wrong habits.  One of the teachers interviewed for the program stated that schools need to actively teach multitasking because it is such an important life skill.  Attempting to teach that which cannot be learned is not in anyone’s best interests.  Perhaps a better approach would be to critically examine the role technology plays in learning.

Teaching with Technology

Digital Nation’s producers visited a middle school in the south Bronx that has completely embraced technology in the classroom.  Student laptops have been credited with saving the school by improving discipline and test scores, reducing truancy, and establishing a 21st century learning environment.  They view technology like oxygen; ubiquitous, necessary, and something never to be withheld.  For many educators, their model of teaching with technology could be considered the ideal.

Others, however, are less enthusiastic.  Todd Oppenheimer, author of The Flickering Mind, is concerned that technology can dampen students’ attention span, create boredom, and lead to “instant gratification education”. He contends that the ability to click on a whim can “bifurcate the brain, keeps it from being able to pursue one linear thought, and teaches you that you should be able to have every urge answered the minute the urge occurs.”

Any school that uses technology has experienced at least some of the successes and problems featured in the program; most schools live somewhere between these extremes.  Technology is neither education’s savior or scourge, and balance is achieved by weighing the risk against the reward.  Is higher academic achievement worth a diminishing of our collective patience? Is the self-guided engagement that a computer provides worth decreased human interaction?  The answers to these subjective questions are beyond the scope of this space (and Digital Nation itself), but one thing is clear; technology facilitates change, and change comes at a price.

With Change Comes Loss

An unpleasant reality mentioned throughout the program was the loss that accompanies change.  The advent of writing shifted us away from being an oral culture, and consequently we lost some of our ability to remember.  The mass production of text enabled a wider variety of writers to be published, and as a result our language has lost some of its beauty and sophistication.  Living and learning in a digital society will lead to loss as well, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

The importance of factual knowledge, the development of interpersonal skills, even the role of teachers in the classroom will change (and have changed) as a result of technology.  It may be hard to accept, but as the producers noted, “We grew up in a world anchored in pages you turn.  Maybe there is something these kids are getting that we’re not sure how to value yet.”  Our students are getting the ability to acquire knowledge, process information, and demonstrate understanding in new and amazing ways; I think that’s something we can all value.

Time Well Spent

If you haven’t done so already, I would encourage you to set aside some time to watch Digital Nation and explore the online resources for parents and teachers.  The program raises more questions than it answers, but if it generates conversation regarding how best to serve our students, it should be considered time well spent.

The impact of great teaching is well documented if not well understood.  A decade ago, Robert Marzano found that school-level and teacher-level factors account for approximately 20 percent of the variance in student achievement.  While this  may not seem significant, a student scoring at the 50th percentile who spends two years in an average school, with an average teacher, is likely to continue scoring at the 50th achievement percentile.  Spending two years in a highly effective classroom with a highly effective teacher, however, can raise achievement to the 96th percentile (Marzano, 2003).

What, then, makes for a great teacher?  In reviewing student achievement data, Teach for America found that highly effective teachers “constantly reevaluate what they are doing, avidly recruited students and their families into the process,  maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning, planned exhaustively and purposefully by working backward from the desired outcome, and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.”

In evaluating which traits would best predict teacher effectiveness, Teach for America found that long-regarded qualities such as reflection and self-awareness did not matter nearly as much as a high degree of “life satisfaction” and a track record of perseverance.  Recognizing these characteristics is but one step toward school improvement; current practitioners must be evaluated in terms of their effectiveness as well.  And while test scores should not be the only yardstick for success, charisma, ambitious lesson objectives, and communication skills are not sufficient benchmarks unto themselves.

Whether you are a pre-service educator or a seasoned veteran, I hope you’ll find time to read Ripley’s article and learn more about what separates good from great teachers; the answers, which I’ve only briefly touched on here, may surprise you.

N.B.  As background reading, you may wish to consider School, Teacher, and Leadership Impacts on Student Achievement by Kirsten Miller.

Yesterday K12 Online announced the presenters for their 2009 conference.  This year’s lineup features 55 sessions representing educators from nearly a dozen countries.  Although the conference doesn’t begin until December 7, now is the perfect time to begin perusing the sessions and making plans to participate.  The complete program is available here; be sure to check it out and help spread the word about this incredible professional development opportunity!

On behalf of the instructional technology coordinators, I would like to thank everyone who participated; your collective knowledge, wisdom, and enthusiasm is simply incredible!  If possible, it would be greatly appreciated if you could leave a comment or send an email regarding your experience this summer; your willingness to engage, reflect and share is what the program is all about.

• Will Richardson
  
• Karl Fisch
• Alec Couros
• Kevin Jarrett
• Kim Cofino
• Darren Kuropatwa
• Dean Shareski
• Chris Lehmann
• Jeff Utecht

Summmer Teacher Institute 09

Each week offers a selection of new sessions that will engage participants and provide strategies for effectively utilizing technology in the service of teaching and learning.  Whatever your background, needs, or interests, our Summer Teacher Institute can provide you with the knowledge and skills to transform your classroom into a truly innovative learning environment.

These sessions are open to anyone (although space is limited) and we’re looking forward to an exciting summer of learning.  If you or someone from your school is interested in attending, you can register online or contact us for more information.

We hope you can join us at MICDS this summer!

Sheryl’s entire presentation, including resources, is available on her 21st Century Learning wiki, but she made two points that should particularly resonate with teachers:

• We can’t give away what we don’t own
• None of us are as good as all of us

Although as educators we may fancy ourselves digital immigrants, we need to be familiar with and “own” the technology that our students have so readily embraced.  Even through we may not use it in the same fashion or to the same degree, the responsibility for learning to utilize technology effectively and appropriately cannot fall solely to them.  As I noted last March, the task of “turning on our lights” may be difficult, but it is absolutely necessary if we are to shift our practice and meet our students’ needs.

The days of education as an isolated profession are, thankfully, over.  The digification of the Personal Learning Network has enabled us to extend our reach and resources indefinitely, and curriculum and instruction can and should be approached from a team mentality.  Planning and preparation time are scarce, but collaboration does not have to be limited to face-to-face, synchronous communication.  Students and teachers should make an effort to connect with each other and their respective peers outside the classoom walls.  “All of us” can unlock the potential that lies within each learner.

The focus of Sheryl’s afternoon session was 21st Centuryizing Your Lesson Plans. Beginning with the principles of Passion-based Learning, she helped teachers address and define 21st century learners, 21st century educators, and 21st century skills:

With an understanding of these in mind, lessons can be “21st centuryized” with a simple and effective five step approach:

1. Pick the content
2. Choose the instructional strategy
3. Choose the tool
4. Create the learning activity
5. Use Shirky to make it 21st century

Content, for our program, should reflect the essential questions/enduring understadings of a curriculum vetted through Understanding by Design.  In addition to our own preferred instructional strategies, we should draw upon the work of Robert Marzano and the strategies his reserach identifies as particularly effective.  Tools abound, and Stephanie Sandifer has created a very useful matrix for connecting Marzano’s strategies and technology.  Mishra and Koehler’s TPCK model can help frame learning activities that balance and include technological, pedagogical, and content-area knowledge.  According to Clay Shirky, there are four scaffolded stages to mastering the connected world: sharing, cooperating, collaborating, and collective action.

Collectively, these steps, strategies, and stages can help teachers craft lessons that will engage students and enable them to master the content and skills of the 21st century.  Granted, shifting to such as approach will require considerable and sustained effort.  Working as a cohesive team, however, with the goal of “giving away” rich and meaningful learning should make the endeavor well worthwhile.

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.

Online professional development opportunites abound and this year’s K-12 Online Conference is fast approaching.  For those who have never participated in an online conference, here is a quick overview from the K-12 conference website:

The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2008 conference theme is “Amplifying Possibilities”. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 13, 2008. The following two weeks, October 20-24 and October 27-31, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations. More information about podcast channels and conference web feeds is available!

The conference schedule has something for everyone, and whether you particpate in the live events or catch up via the archived sessions, I would strongly encourage you to get involved.  A small investment of time can expand your horizons and help you amplify the possibilities in your classroom; what could be better than that?