Professional site of Sylvia Libow Martinez
Here’s an interesting new book called The Third Teacher. The book is an exploration of how design can transform teaching and learning, becoming “the third teacher” in the classroom, after adults (parents and teachers) and children (peers and self).
The 79 ideas come from an ongoing collaboration between educators, youth, and designers.
No argument here!
“Please do the following: sit down with your child (and they are just children still) and tell them that they are not allowed to be a member of any social networking site. Today!
Let them know that you will at some point every week be checking their text messages online! You have the ability to do this through your cell phone provider.
Let them know that you will be installing Parental Control Software so you can tell every place they have visited online, and everything they have instant messaged or written to a friend. Don’t install it behind their back, but install it!
Over 90% of all homework does not require the internet, or even a computer. Do not allow them to have a computer in their room, there is no need”
From an e-mail sent home from a New Jersey middle school principal attempting to curb cyberbullying at his school (source)
Changes in technology mirror changes in society and culture, and can impact schools in a number of ways. Some schools hide their heads in the sand. Some take extreme stands like the principal quoted above. Some attempt to address the issues more evenhandedly, even though the law is not clear, nor is the “right” thing to do always obvious.
Schools try to create policies to address issues of cybersafety, security, fair use, and other new issues brought up as technology changes. But these are not actually policy issues, any more than cyberbullying is a technology issue.
People have difficulty making a choice when presented with too many options. And schools are collections of people, and to make it more complicated, people who do not have ultimate authority since they have to answer to parents, the community, school boards, district, city, state, and national oversight.
I just read a study that said that when people do make a choice from among equal options, afterwards they realign their thinking to elevate whatever choice they made to be the best one. We’ve all seen this, once a school policy gets created, it’s hard to change people’s minds. It’s not just that it’s a lot of work to re-do policy, it’s also that once you do the work, your mind creates the illusion that the work and choices you’ve made are the best and most valuable.
As schools face cyberbullying, sexting, fair use, online security, etc. they see a confusing array of policy, tradition, legal, moral and ethical concerns. When confused, people retreat from the threat. Then once that choice to retreat is made, even if they know it’s not optimal, they remain stubbornly wed to that choice.
Julie Evans of Student Speak-Up shared this insight last year after her focus groups with students said that teachers who got training about the Internet started using it less. Confusion creates support for limitations, and those limitations get set in stone. It’s human nature.
To me, this makes the task to involve schools in making informed choices regarding technology policy even more urgent.
The problem with this principal’s stand is not that he’s wrong. In fact, he’s probably right. If he had a magic wand and could actually make parents stop their children from texting and accessing the Internet, and the children actually stopped, and we rolled the clock back to 1970, we could just go back to the good old days of kids harassing each other in person.
The problem with this principal’s plan is that it won’t work. We simply can’t put this genie back in the bottle. We HAVE to address the issue of digital citizenship in the real climate that children actually live in.
This is a floodgate well and truly open, whether or not you declare it closed.
(via Media Release) – More than 1,000 students and teachers will fight hunger this Thursday by correctly answering vocabulary, math and other curriculum area questions on their state-issued laptops. This is part of the largest Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) annual student conference ever, held at the University of Maine, Orono.
The conference is partnering with the United Nations’ World Food Programme to host the students and teachers on a specially-developed version of FreeRice.com, a web site where users make donations of rice to feed hungry people by answering core curriculum questions around vocabulary, mathematics, geography, science and more.
Maine’s laptop program is the first to work with FreeRice.com to create a localized effort to raise food for the hungry. A customized version of the site will be available to challenge Maine students, along with invitees from around the world, to raise as much food as they can.
The project showcases how technology can help make learning relevant and engaging for students by allowing them to address a real world problem via a social network while learning.
There is also a local hunger connection – students have been encouraged to bring canned foods to donate to the Good Shepherd Food Bank, Maine’s largest food bank.
The project also presented a technological challenge for network technicians at the University of Maine System, who are busy finalizing a wireless network that will host more than 1,000 wireless laptops simultaneously in the 1400 seat Hutchins Concert Hall in the Collins Center for the Arts.
A representative of FreeRice.com from the World Food Programme will address students via video conference to kick off the event.
There will also be student-led workshops all day, such as:
This sounds like a great idea to raise funds and awareness of what students are doing with technology! You can participate too – pass it on!
Sylvia
In the last 10 seconds, 9 iPhones were sold, 90 people joined Facebook, 100 blog posts were created, 6,000 people joined a “social game,” 7,000 tweets were tweeted, 125,000 videos were watched on YouTube, and 2,00,000 SMS text messages were sent worldwide. This is according to a cute little Flash app by Gary Hayes, a social media producer and speaker from Australia. Be sure to click on the social media, mobile, and games tabs to see all the numbers. It’s astounding.
It’s a hyper-charged world out there, gaining momentum every second. And every second, schools are closing the doors to this world to students. Whether this is out of fear, confusion, or a belief that this is just a social fad, it’s lost time for schools.
The world is changing, and insisting it’s not won’t do any good. Schools must grapple with the questions and the implications even though the challenges grow and the rapid changes in technology constantly call every decision into question. Tackling these questions, even if mistakes are made along the way, is better than irrelevance.
Sylvia
So back a few months ago, before I devoted my life to airplane seat testing, I got a chance to attend TEDxNYED. TEDx events are independently organized small conferences, typically one day filled with invited speakers who, in TED style, speak for a short time about a common theme. This TEDxNYED was held in New York City and the theme was education. It was a great day filled with inspiring speakers and terrific hallway conversations. I had every good intention of writing my reflections about the day, the speakers, and the theme, but time slipped away and I never did it.
Perhaps this is a good thing, because sometimes reflections need to percolate through the brain for a while. Plus, waiting this long means that the videos are all online for your enjoyment! So don’t take my word for it, enjoy the videos yourself!
First off, the facts –
Now that some time has passed, my reflections are coalescing around a few key points:
The diversity issue
I had more than one person whisper to me that it was a real shame how underrepresented women and people of color were as speakers. I KNOW the organizers tried, they told me they did and I believe them. What’s worse is that of the three women speakers, two were disappointing to me. Yes, I’ll be brave and name names. My two least favorite speakers of the day were Gina Bianchini, co-founder and at the time CEO of Ning (she has since left the company) and Neeru Khosla, co-founder and Executive Director of CK-12 Foundation. Gina Bianchini gave a generic speech about using technology to connect optimists, and then made a left turn into education, where it was immediately apparent that she knew nothing about the subject. Her idea of taking the “models” of open source software and agile product development and using it for teacher evaluation was breathtaking in its lack of understanding of any of these subjects. But there she was, simply being “optimistic” about it. Sorry, just not good enough. Neeru Khosla, on the other hand, is a woman with a plan, which she repeated over and over again in a relentless sales pitch. Her non-profit has taken textbooks and put them online for free. So without any thought to whether this is a good idea or not, but lots of buzzwords about digital literacy and 21st century skills, she pitched her website to the group. Digital textbooks are certainly worth talking about, and it would have been interesting to discuss if they have relevance or if it’s simply putting an old content model in new delivery system. But no, that was never touched on. It was simply a blatant sales pitch for a free product. Her session unfortunately stood out like a sore thumb for its commercialism and lack of thoughtfulness.
But… back to the good stuff. Here’s Andy Carvin – TEDxNYED Talk: The New Volunteers: Social Media, Disaster Response And You
I hope the upcoming youth-planned and youth-led TEDxRedmond event this fall is just as thought-provoking!
Sylvia
New data from the U.S. government National Center for Educational Statistics: Teachers’ Use of Educational Technology in U.S. Public Schools: 2009.
This First Look report presents data from a spring 2009 Fast Response Survey System FRSS survey on the availability and use of educational technology by public elementary/secondary school teachers. The teacher survey includes information on the use of computers and Internet access in the classroom; availability and use of computing devices, software, and school or district networks including remote access by teachers; students’; use of educational technology; teachers’; preparation to use educational technology for instruction; and technology-related professional development activities. (released May 2010)
Some key highlights:
The data is broken down by school size and location, teacher experience, and lots of other variables. They asked about blogs, wikis and other social media, both for parent and student communication as well as class assignments. so if you want to know what percentage of teachers have students contribute to blogs or wikis, and how that varies urban to rural, poverty level, or by years of teacher experience, it’s all here. (Overall, 12% rarely, 9% sometimes/often) There are little variations to ponder, like how the biggest response for “rarely” is from big urban schools.
And that carries throughout – high poverty schools do have and use computers, but the students are doing test prep, not creative work.
So – a treasure trove here for data fans out there…
Update – here’s the link to the raw data.
Sylvia
These six stages roughly summarize my experience with students and their withdrawal from grade use. Not every child will react this way, and some will relapse more than others, but I have taught with no grades for five years, and these steps reflect my experiences with detoxing students from grade use.
via For the Love of Learning: Detoxing students from grade-use
Really interesting post by Joe Bower. I always learn when teachers write down exactly what they do to achieve something like this. Grades are so pervasive in education today, it’s no wonder that students (and teachers and parents) need to have some time to change their expectations!
Sylvia
You get to talk to lots of interesting people on airplanes. A while back, I was sitting next to an older gentleman from Texas. He was a grandfather nearing retirement, working in the banking industry. We exchanged the usual family and job facts, and as usual whenever I mention that I work with schools, he wanted to share some stories. Of course, everyone is an expert at school. They went, they have children — it’s the one institution that we all have in common. People like telling their stories.
This particular Texas gentleman had grandchildren ranging in age from babies to teens, and his daughter was a teacher too. “It’s not like back when I went to school,” he said after a time, and I braced for the rest of the sentence. I fully expected it to be something about getting back to basics, or how today’s kids don’t value education and the parents don’t discipline them.
But then he said something completely different. He said that when he went to school, his teachers encouraged him to think, and that they helped students do their work, not just memorize facts. He said that he’s often in his grandchildren’s classrooms and “the teachers talk all the time” from the front of the class. He wondered how anyone could learn like that. “It wasn’t like that when I was young,” he sighed.
Later on, I sat there questioning all my assumptions. Of course not all “olden days” teachers were drilling students. How could I have had that image in my head? When people think about the past, of course we all recall had different experiences. Talking about how school used to be is meaningless; it’s too dependent on your personal experience. Unfortunately, we hear this kind of language all the time, whether it’s to point at the “bad old days” or the “good old days” Neither of them ever really existed.
People are always searching for the new new thing – it’s human nature to enjoy stimulating new ideas. However, things like 21st century skills, where we try to define what students need to know “now” (as if creative thinking wasn’t ever valued,) is a solution to a problem that may not exist. It may just be a reflection of our vast, yet fundamentally faulty collective memory of things that never were.
Sylvia
As part of National Volunteer Week, today is Global Youth Service Day!
Global Youth Service Day is an annual campaign that celebrates and mobilizes the millions of children and youth who improve their communities each day of the year through service and service-learning.
Established in 1988, GYSD is the largest service event in the world and is now celebrated in over 100 countries. On GYSD, children and youth address the world’s most critical issues in partnership with families, schools, community and faith-based organizations, businesses, and governments.
Happy Global Youth Service Day!
Sylvia
If you are thinking about summer professional development, think about Constructing Modern Knowledge!
The 3rd annual Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute will be July 12-15, 2009 in Manchester, NH USA (near Boston).
In addition to master educators and edtech pioneers, the Constructing Modern Knowledge 2010 faculty includes history educator James Loewen and bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me; popular provocateur and author, Alfie Kohn; MacArthur Genius and incomparable school reformer, Deborah Meier; and children’s author, illustrator and animator, Peter Reynolds. Cynthia Solomon, Brian Silverman, Sylvia Martinez (that’s me!), Gary Stager and John Stetson round out the amazing faculty.
Constructing Modern Knowledge is a minds-on institute for educators committed to creativity, collaboration and computing. Participants have the opportunity to engage in intensive computer-rich project development with peers and a world-class faculty. Inspirational guest speakers, pre-conference expedition and social events round out the fantastic event.
Constructing Modern Knowledge is about action, not listening to speakers. It’s where we learn together how to make project-based learning happen in real classrooms with real software and real computers.
Spend four cool summer days in New England making puppets roar, robots dance, animations delight, movies move, simulations stimulate, photos sing and leave with memories to last a lifetime! See you there 😉
Early bird registration deadline is May 1 – Register online now!
Sylvia