Tag: technology

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Project-ing Tech Literacy

More reaction to the new whitepaper Assessing Technology Literacy: The Case for an Authentic, Project-Based Learning Approach (Read more or download PDF)

From Education Week:

“A new whitepaper addressing recent calls for technology literacy education argues any such education should involve project-based learning, while a separate new report indicates the need for such education may soon increase. The whitepaper from Jonathan D. Becker, a grant evaluator for the U.S. Department of Education, and Cherise A. Hodge and Mary W. Sepelyak, doctoral candidates at Richmond’s Virginia Commonwealth University, insists that, despite contention over what exactly constitutes technology literacy, there is consensus in the 49 states with technology literacy goals that the construct is multidimensional, and that one of those dimensions is acting or doing. In other words, students don’t just observe technology. They interact with it, meaning any instruction involving technology literacy should include students using technology in an active or interactive way.”

via Project-ing Tech Literacy – Digital Education – Education Week.

Although they got Dr. Becker’s job wrong (he’s actually an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University,) it’s a nice analysis of the whitepaper! Hope you read it and share with principals, tech coordinators, and others wondering what to do about student technology literacy.

Assessing Technology Literacy: The Case for an Authentic, Project-Based Learning Approach (PDF)

Sylvia

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The ISTE opening keynote – what I wish had been said

I know  this is not fair – Monday morning quarterbacking what someone else said in a keynote. I respect people who keynote, it’s a very difficult job to be entertaining while delivering a coherent, interesting message for a large, diverse audience. I cringe when people criticize, yet here I am doing it.

I did a quick blog post a few days ago about the keynote by Jean-Francois Rischard, the author of High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them. His book identifies urgent global issues and proposes better, alternative methodologies for developing solutions. According to Mr. Rischard, the effectiveness of any solution to a global problem hinges on technological innovation and collective action, including action by students.

But as I was listening, here’s what I wish he was saying.

  • These global problems must be solved by including people who are traditionally not included in solutions to big problems. These problems cannot be solved by the “usual suspects” – governments, military, big corporations, etc. We must find ways to include people who do not usually get invited to the table – people in small countries, the poor, and youth. The voice and energy of these traditionally disenfranchised people are necessary to solve these problems.
  • Technology is a solution to bringing these voices out and including people who are not at the table (yet.)
  • Youth must be at the table for the solutions of the future to be viable. They are the ones who will live there, they are the ones who will solve the problems.

In my mind, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) movement is based on these ideas. Putting the power of the computer directly into the hands of children around the world means that these children have unprecedented access to information and ideas that can change their lives and their communities, and perhaps the world.

And why bring this message to ISTE 2010? Because these educators are where these youth are, and understand technology. Youth are not going to suddenly rise up and do this by themselves – the Facebook group “I hate BP” is not going to solve the oil spill problem.

Educators are like sherpas for the future. By guiding students to develop a global perspective, problem-solving skills and a voice, they are creating capacity for these students to gradually solve larger and more global problems. Students may not start by tackling global warming, but by helping to clean up the local marsh. The skills of collaboration, teamwork, creative problem solving are the same. Having an educator who can guide this process and help students learn these skills as they tackle real problems is crucial.

I think Mr. Rischard missed the point by saying that we should develop curriculum for K-12 that does this. I believe students learn these things by DOING them, starting at a smaller scale, but really doing things that matter, and with guidance from adults who have a real relationship with their students.

I’m reminded of my own daughter who was a theater and choir kid. The TV show Glee is essentially about her. One year the school board had to cut the budget and decided to cut field trips and transportation – but allowed an exception if the students were “participating” in whatever the event was. It meant that the football team kept their busses, but the drama trip to the Shakespeare performance was cancelled because they would be “just watching”.

The drama kids were of course upset and decided to “do something about it.” Luckily, the drama teacher was trusted by the kids, and they shared their frustrations and plans with her. She worked with them – past the plan to TP the board members houses to a plan to go to the school board meeting. She helped them understand that they could frame their argument in an educational context rather than an “it’s not fair the jocks get everything” argument. And she could do this because she was willing to listen — and because she listened to them, they listened to her.

The happy ending to that story is that they got the policy rewritten, and got a lot of praise from the school board for their thoughtful arguments that the creative process needed both participation and expertise. The clincher argument (thought of by one of the students) was that the policy would have allowed a trip to a “Color Me Mine” – one of those do-it-yourself pot painting storefronts, but not a trip to the art museum.

The point is that if we want to solve global problems, we know we need technology, we know we need the students who will solve these problems to come togther, and we know we need educators willing to develop real relationships with youth along the way.

The thousands of educators at ISTE 2010 hold the key to all of these.

Sylvia

-Posted from the Blogger’s Cafe at ISTE 2010

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Reality check – is panic over technology overblown?

“NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.

So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans.

But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously.”

via Op-Ed Contributor – Mind Over Mass Media – NYTimes.com.

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Technology policy and human nature

“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.

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Teachers’ Use of Educational Technology in U.S. Public Schools: 2009

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:

  • Teachers reported that they or their students used computers in the classroom during instructional time often (40 percent) or sometimes (29 percent)
  • Results differed by low and high poverty concentration of the schools for the percentage of teachers that reported their students used educational technology sometimes or often during classes to prepare written text (66 and 56 percent, respectively), learn or practice basic skills (61 and 83 percent, respectively), and develop and present multimedia presentations (47 and 36 percent, respectively)
  • The percentage of teachers that reported that the following activities prepared them (to a moderate or major extent) to make effective use of educational technology for instruction are 61 percent for professional development activities, 61 percent for training provided by school staff responsible for technology support and/or integration, and 78 percent for independent learning
  • Of the teachers who participated in technology-related professional development during the 12 months prior to completing the survey, 81 percent agreed that ―it met my goals and needs,‖ 88 percent agreed that ―it supported the goals and standards of my state, district, and school,‖ 87 percent agreed that ―it applied to technology available in my school,‖ and 83 percent agreed that ―it was available at convenient times and places

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

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Constructivist Celebration @ ISTE 2010

New announcement! Here we go again – the 4th annual Constructivist Celebration @ ISTE is open for registration. If you are going to ISTE (formerly known as NECC) this June in Denver, consider coming a day early for this very special event. It sells out every year, so don’t delay!

Constructivist Celebration @ ISTE – Sunday, June 27, 2010 8:30 – 3:30

The Constructivist Celebration is an opportunity for you to let your creativity run free with the world’s best open-ended software tools in a great setting with enthusiastic colleagues who share your commitment to children, computing, creativity and constructivism. You might think of this stimulating event as a spa day for your mind and soul!

Best of all, the Constructivist Celebration @ ISTE is being held within a few minute walk of the Denver Convention Center, home of the ISTE Conference.

Then you will enjoy five hours of creativity on your own laptop using open-ended creativity software provided by consortium members FableVision, Inspiration, LCSI, and Tech4Learning. Participants will also receive a TechYES Student Technology Certification Mini-kit from Generation YES and SchookIT folks will assist with project development.

Creative computer-using educators deserve to eat like an Italian prince. That’s why this year’s Constructivist Celebration includes continental breakfast, mid-morning refreshment, a three-course Italian lunch and afternoon snacks. This is in addition to the free creativity software and Imagine it2 DVD each participant will receive.

At $60 for the whole package, the Constructivist Celebration is an incredibly affordable event!

Sign up today for the Constructivist Celebration @ ISTE 2010.

I’m excited about this event, it’s always a fun, fabulous day with a creative community. Every year it’s different, and every year I learn something new. I can’t wait to see some of you there!

Sylvia

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Students teach tech to superintendents

Last month at AASA (the American Association of School Administrators annual conference) in Phoenix, Arizona, several GenYES students from nearby Paradise Valley School District were invited to participate in an Apple itouch/ipod workshop for the attending superintendents.

Apple ipod Conference AASA from Debbie Kovesdy on Vimeo.

GenYES students from elementary, middle and high school presented the devices, circulated through the audience as the superintendents learned about educational uses, and provided help throughout the workshop.

And when you watch this video, notice that these students care deeply that these adults grasp how important using technology is for them. The good news is, there are students like this in every school, just waiting for an opportunity to put their passion about digital communication to good use to improve learning.

These students are part of a district-wide vision in Paradise Valley that students are a crucial part of integrating technology into every classroom. GenYES classes teach students technology, mentoring, and leadership so they can assist teachers and fellow students with technology.

As you can see, Paradise Valley is a leader in student-centered technology. They were the first K12 institution in the world to make content, lessons, and student work available on ITunes U/K12. Their pTUNES portal is now available to schools and districts statewide through a partnership with Apple, Arizona IDEAL, and Arizona State University (ASU). For this innovation, pTUNES was awarded the 2009 Cox Technology in Education Award. More about PTUNES…

Oh, one more thing – the video was (of course) produced by the GenYES team at Shadow Mountain High School in Paradise Valley.

Congratulations to the students, teachers, and administrators at PVUSD!

Sylvia

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Thinking about BYOT – Bring Your Own Technology? Start with students!

Districts should also talk with students before they start something new, said Mitchell of Forsyth County Schools. Administrators need to ask the kids how they approach learning with technology, what kinds of tech tools they would like to see in school and how they would use the tools if they had them, which is what his district has done with its bring-your-own-technology (BYOT) push.

“In the past, we would come up with an initiative, and we’d get it funded, we’d plan for it, we’d roll it out,” Mitchell said. “Did we ever ask the students about it? No. So some of the newer initiatives we’re doing like this BYOT, we’re starting with that conversation with students — “what do y’all think?” — and getting that ground floor involvement with them at the onset of the project, ’cause ultimately that’s who we’re doing it for anyway.”

via School Districts Lay Foundation for Mobile Devices.

This is from an article from Converge Magazine about students bringing their own technology (BYOT) to school. It has practical suggestions from several different school districts across the U.S. for planning and implementing this strategy.

Sylvia

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Edutopia – Students Teach Technology to Teachers

“When middle school students Alison and Nat confer with their teachers, it’s to talk about the lessons the students are preparing for student teachers as part of a new Generation www.Y program. The young people are part of a growing group in schools across the country who are sharing their own expertise to help make prospective teachers more aware of how students learn and the best ways technology can be used to support their learning.”

Edutopia, the website of the George Lucas Educational Foundation published this story and video on the GenYES program in Olympia, WA. The video is from a while back when the model was called Generation www.Y. That was a bit difficult to pronounce, so we changed the name to GenYES.

This video was created during an interesting time period – the GenYES students not only worked with teachers at their school, but formed teams with their teacher and a pre-service teacher. These 3 member teams learned and taught each other technology, and prepared lessons using new technology. Just another way students can be involved in improving education for all!

Sylvia

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NAIS and PETE and C

February and March are hotbeds of activity for state and national education and technology conferences. Next week I’ll be at both ends of the U.S. at two conferences of interest to educators interested in technology.

NAIS is the National Association of Independent Schools annual conference. Private schools have been on the forefront of the laptop movement both in the US and around the world. The 2010 conference is in San Francisco Feb 24-26,  and I’ll be there with the Constructivist Consortium. This is a group of small companies who promote constructivist use of software in schools for creativity and student-centered learning. Generation YES is one of the founding members and we’ll be at booth 239 – come by and say hello!

PETE&C is the Pennsylvania state technology conference held annually in Hershey, PA. Yes, that Hershey, and yes, it does smell like chocolate! Running Feb 24-27, this conference is all about technology and education. Pennsylvania’s education reform program, Classrooms for the Future (CFF) has created a strong network of educator-coaches who support innovative programs statewide. Building internal leadership like this is a terrific idea, and Pennsylvania is certainly reaping the benefits of investing in their own people.

At PETE&C, I’ll be doing a session on Feb 23 on student leadership and digital citizenship – if you are going to PETE&C I hope you’ll stop by.

Student leadership is a topic that might not on the surface seem to be technology related, but schools hoping to increase their authentic use of technology need to be thinking about. The guiding principle of putting power into student hands can be both concrete (actually handing them equipment) and abstract (giving them responsibility and agency over their learning). Both support each other, and schools that give students responsibility and guide them as they learn to use it gain so much. Students who believe that they have a stake in their own education will contribute to the effort to make education better for all. Schools that take this  empowerment to heart help create the citizens, learners, and leaders we need in the world.

So say hello in person or on Twitter! I love to meet friends new and old!

Sylvia