A bit of a read…..that’s what happens when you have an
English major who becomes an administrator. Read at your leisure this
summer.
Empowerment
Prior to my employment with GCS, I worked in Sunnyside School District as an Academic
Technology Integration Coordinator. There, I assisted teachers in
developing best practices in the classroom using modern technology on both the
teacher and student sides of the spectrum, as well as providing assistance and
guidance for the district’s fledgling Digital
Advantage 1:1 merit program, which awarded privately-funded netbooks to
students who demonstrated excellence in attendance, behavior, involvement, and
academics. Sunnyside is a high-poverty district which is 88% Hispanic and
5% Native American, with more than 30% ENL and 86% on free and reduced
lunch.
When SUSD began providing their students with netbooks (an
initiative which has expanded into a “loaner” 1:1 program across several grade
levels), they discovered that they became tools of empowerment for
struggling families who had never owned a computer before. Families with
no computer skills and little English ability suddenly obtained a seemingly
infinite number of resources they could use to their advantage. Families
had access to online banking, grade and attendance reports for their children,
easier access to federal online resources, and online programs that assisted
them in learning English. Students from poverty families now had easy
access to all of the same free resources that their more well-to-do peers in
nearby districts had, thus helping to level the playing field somewhat.
We maintained and provided a master list of all businesses
and public spaces in the district that provided free or low-priced Wi-Fi access
so that families could get online easily if they could not do so at home.
In turn, this stimulated the local economy by providing coffee shops and other
businesses with customers who might never have entered the building before.
At Central Office, we soon received multiple reports from building principals
that their Digital Advantage families were using the heck out of these netbooks
in a variety of positive ways that we had not anticipated. Additionally,
because the “seeding” of netbooks across the community created the potential
for multiple family members to use the netbooks for academics, for financial
planning, and for general improvement, the potential for economic development
and improvement across the district went up significantly. In a county
such as Elkhart, with our high poverty students, high unemployment rate, and
the potential Horizon 2.0 initiatives, providing our students with laptops
could serve as a similar means for empowerment across the Goshen area.
Career Readiness in the Information Age
While it is certainly far from approved or even ready for a
ballot initiative, the Horizon 2.0 concept understands that many may not: that
the future of employment in the United States will depend upon students who are
ready for careers in a digital environment. While a resurgence of the
manufacturing sector is certainly crucial to US economic growth, even many of
the most basic of manufacturing jobs rely on a level of information processing
and computer skills awareness that is far beyond that expected of high school
graduates even ten years ago. Higher-paying jobs that will be an integral
part of the new e-conomy will depend upon collaborative, web-reliant workspaces
that our students have little experience with. Modern office workers in
the digital age collaborate on documents, projects, and even basic spreadsheet
development online, simultaneously, in ways that enhance productivity
differently than anything most of us have used in our professional lives.
Even the simple conference call has become a digital environment where people
can video-conference online with dozens of people, sharing and editing
documents in real time on the computer screen. We have done a fine job
with providing a number of thin client labs and an outstanding Mac lab for
graphic design training, but if we are to prepare our students to compete in
the information age, we need to do more than that. Students need access
to computers on a far more regular basis than 2-3 periods in a thin client classroom
will provide them with in order to prepare them to be competitive workers and
to be able to perform right from the start in the digital environments that are
now commonplace in most post-secondary educational opportunities.
College Readiness
At Goshen High School, we are proud to have a majority of
teachers who have developed an online presence using the open-source Moodle
learning environment. As with anything else, however (learning goals,
BBK, TAP, CCSS), we must do more if we are to improve and help our students
succeed. Most college courses have a required online component in
addition to the live classroom. College students are using Moodle and
Blackboard to post and respond to assignments, engage in online discussion with
other students and the professor, take assessments of their knowledge and
skills, and discover resources provided to them by the professor and other
students. They are using Google Docs to collaboratively write and edit
papers, PowerPoint presentations, and other projects. They are using
Twitter hashtags
to engage in lively secondary levels of discussion with other students in other
classrooms in other universities about the same topics they are studying in
their own classrooms, often with their mobile devices. If we continue to
rely upon thin clients and textbooks, rather than taking the academic and
financial risk of using laptops and embracing the use of mobile devices in the
classroom, we will fail to engage with our students on a higher level in ways
that they find most relevant.
Communication
If students (and by default, their parents and families as
noted above) have laptops assigned by the Corporation, we have the ability to
assign them email addresses and create groups based on classrooms, clubs, ECA
study groups, and other areas of need and communicate with them easily, 24
hours a day, at will. Students can subscribe to their teachers’ posted
assignment Google Calendars and always have an updated schedule of lesson plans
or assignments. We often have to rely upon teachers to convey the message
from administrators, parents to convey information to students, students to
convey information to parents – with a unified, assigned email account system
for students, we can communicate directly with students as stakeholders in
their own education.
Student-Friendly, Relevant Methods
Students are texting, using Facebook, and posting and
commenting on YouTube videos in what has become a constant cycle of multiple
levels of digital creation and consumption. We cannot continue to expect
students to engage with the classroom in the same ways that we did in previous
years. The argument that they will have to learn how to process information
in the same lecture-based, textbook-focused, static ways that schools have done
for years because that is how they will learn to be successful in college and
career is rapidly becoming more and more of a tired and irrelevant
argument. We have long known that differentiated instruction requires
reaching out to students in ways that embrace each student’s best means of
learning; why are we not including their embrace of the “new media” as simply
another tool in our differentiated instruction toolbox?
As the creator of SUSD’s online Dropout Recovery initiative,
I embraced the use
of social media as a way to “talk” with my students and provide a way for
them to discuss the material with other students taking the same courses.
Traditional online interactions with students require teachers to post
something and allow or require students to respond; school-friendly social
networking sites such as Edmodo.com allow
students to interact with each other in a Facebook-like environment and to
share the control of the conversation in ways that they are familiar
with. My students used Edmodo, using the netbooks provided by the Dropout
Recovery program, to interact and seeks assistance from other students in
understanding key concepts and argue and discuss key issues from the
coursework. It was an integral part of the program that helped many
students in their success.
When I taught English at Cienega High School in the Vail
School District, my students used little, if any, paper. In class, they
were organized heterogeneously according to performance and ability into study
groups. These groups developed projects together online, analyzed the
text through online notation, and collaborated to write papers together using
argumentative theses developed either individually or as a group. I can’t
count the number of times I peeked into a research paper document they shared
with me in Google Docs
and discovered through the revisions history that they were online discussing
the topic and revising the paper at home late at night simultaneously.
When papers were ready to be handed in, they emailed me a notification that
this was the case and simply shared the document with me online; I added my own
notes and notified them that they could go in and revise and resubmit when
necessary.
When we engaged in PowerPoint-focused direct instruction
with discussion in class, these study groups took notes collaboratively in the
same document that I could use for a quick formative assessment of
comprehension after class. They could digitally ask questions, edit and
add to one another’s thoughts and responses to class material, and correct one
another’s notes regarding the material. Students with low-processing
ability could see how higher-processing students were analyzing the material:
they could, in effect, watch one another think on “paper.”
Students collaborated on developing wiki-based
textbooks of their own on major topics in class. They used the basic
list of online resources that I provided as a starting point, and through
research online, added links and other online resources of their own for use by
other students. They used the constantly changing and updated textbook
that is the internet to provide relevant and current information for
consumption by other students.
Students in my classroom were able to use both mobile
devices and the computers on their desks to provide me with relevant, real-time
formative information on a near-daily basis using PollEverywhere.com.
Periodically during direct instruction or group work, I could throw up a screen
on the board with a question; they could text their answers back to me as
though they were using high-cost clicker systems. Charts on the screen
showed their responses in real time as though they were watching the “ask the
audience” segment from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. This provided me
instant data on where and who I needed to reteach which skills and concepts.
I had students use Twitter using their mobile devices to
provide a secondary level of discussion during class. I kept a
projected screen of any tweets that referenced the hashtag
#mrtonksclassroom; students texted in questions and responses during times when
I or other students were talking. We used these tweets as seamless parts
of the classroom experience, allowing students to engage in and often drive the
discussion in ways that are simply not possible without using technology.
Do I even have to go into the multiple ways in which
students would be able to use laptops to access on a 24 hour per day basis
resources posted by the teacher such as podcasts, video & audio recordings
of writing revision or demonstrations using document cameras and microphones, Google
Calendars of lesson plans and student assignments, and blog postings about
classroom happenings and announcements?
I should mention that, in my final year of teaching, I don’t
believe we cracked a single textbook open.
And so…
As a Corporation that clearly considers what is best for
students as the primary decision-making tool, before we ask “can we afford to
do this?” or “is this a risk I can afford to take in my classroom?”, we must
ask ourselves “can we really afford NOT to?”
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