Edging Ahead…

A few random thoughts here, on completion of four courses of a “Certificate of Educational Technology and Information Literacy” certificate program. But first a little Rant. And no visuals…

HOW is it that Murphy’s Law, or Sod’s Corollary, or whatever it is, can be counted on SO strongly, especially when the victim is on deadline? Is it just that when you’re juggling too many balls you don’t pay enough attention to each, or do things really go wrong in inverse proportion to the half-life before Crunch time (i.e. As the time before deadline shrinks in a logarithmic fashion the number of things (particularly tech-related things) that go wrong rises exponentially. (What would a graph of that would look like? Sort of like a Hockey Stick overlaid on a skateboard ramp? Al Gore, top that one ;0))

Take tonight. Last assignemnt of yet another SUNY course on using technology to ramp up learning. Just a few tweaks to the final project (a proposed Teaching Unit to be impemented next semester, then a final blog posting, and we’re done – easily before Pumpkin Time, set as the drop-dead deadline for this course, leaving  exactly a week for the instructors to grade the thing before the Xmas Break. Seems like a fair deal all around.

But it’s Friday, and Friday NIght is Family Night. But no sweat. The project’s almost done.  No problem taking the family to an early movie and then to dinner, get home by 8 or so, settle down to whack off the last bits, and still get to bed before the stroke of midnight.

Except for Murphy. Or Sod. Whomever. To begin with, it’s 9:15 before we abort the movie (too mature for the munchkin), find an alternate for dinner that doesn’t feature “sausage” which was all young master would for the past two week – but not today, then run the Friday Night Gauntlet of Bangkok traffic to get home.

9:15. Ha. Lots of time.  Make excuses (Just for Tonight!) on Bedtime Story. Boot the computer, and get online to get this done – but hey, what’s that? Only three lights on the ADSL modem instead of four. Four years with this service and TONIGHT it decides to hiccup? Panic’’s naughty little fingers begin to knead the iron bar that’s suddenly resting across shoulders. Relax. Relax. It’s only a graduate course. Been there. Done that. Dozens of times. No Sweat.

Try the modem again, fingers drumming in an increasingly distracted tempo while the neat little row of lights flashes, flickers, and settles back at – three. No joy on the final “Internet” light. Try it one more time – just in case the first three times were flukes… Check cable connections. Test the phone for dial-tone. No problem.

Dig into the Network Connection Settings. Find an error message pointing the finger at the host computer. “Host computer does not respond”. NOT RESPOND? TONIGHT, of all nights?

Ok. Where’s the provider helpline phone number? Get some Tech help on it. Call out the troops to unearch a telephone bill, decipher the Thai instructions, locate the help number, and call the service. Hope for the best. Call the instructor to use the “dog ate my homework” excuse?

An other half hour trickes away, but then, amazingly the uncharacteristically knowledgeable, helpful and patient young man on the other end walks us through an array of helpscreens, resets, and Connect buttons, and Presto – we’re back in business. And it ’s only 10:30. Lots of time. Forget the cutesy tweaks on the Unit Plan. After all, it’s a work in progress. A quick browse through to check for gross inadequacy or error, and “Dystopian Fiction and the Futures We Make” is carved in…silicon. And except for this final blog post, that’s another notch on the old Professional Development Peacemaker.

Kind of reminds me of planning a tech-rich experience for the classroom – in the Open Area ’70’s, the “Back to Basics” 80’s, the “Wired World” 90’s, and yes, still in this “web2.0″ world of (nearly) 2010. And when all is said and done, the old aphorisms still apply…

1. The more things change the more they stay the same
2. What goes around comes around
3. A Bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
4. Everythng old is New Again
5. The medium is the message

Or is it really…

1. The more things change, the more they leave me confused…
2. What goes around is likely to smack me in the chops if I’m not paying attention
3. A bird in the hand is a feathery mess
4. Everything old is apt to fail just when you need it most
5. The medium is the (brain) massage…

11:57 on the little server-sync’d taskmaster in the bottom corner of the screen. Lots of time to spare. Say, what’s that orange glow on the road outside?…

How do you manage the use of technology peripherals with students? What are some things you’ve learned and hope to implement?

You manage by recognizing, at the outset, the “Technology Adoption Life-Cycle”.  Secondly, by recognizing the power of “the Horseshoe Nail Hypothesis” as you implement a management strategy.

Image  courtesy of Intellitang.com .

The importance of physical management might be overlooked by the zealous educator eager to focus on teaching applications of these ubiquitous add-on devices. As a librarian, though, I have  observed that  Murphy’s Law combined with the “Horseshoe Nail Hypothesis” can torpedo the very best-laid plans.

Murphy’s Law (If it can go wrong, it will) is King when it comes to using often small,  usually expensive and sometimes quirky attachments and peripherals – and the odds of the Demonstration Dialectic of  “Sod’s Law” (a demonstration will always fail in front of an intended audience) being invoked are virtually guaranteed if all the bits of a peripheral (like, for example, the batteries) are not accounted for. And if either Murphy or Sod have a hand in things, then The Horseshoe Nail Hypothesis for Educators (I’m thinking of patenting the term, which  doesn’t show up in a Google search, even in Wikipedia) is almost guaranteed to prove TRUE (for the Want of a Widget the Lesson was Lost)

We’ve found the best way of physically managing peripherals housed in our Main Library is to have them cataloged in our online catalog right along with the books and AV materials.  This allows us to;

• Identify with certainty which items are currently on loan.We barcode – everything, including cables, SD cards and even rechargeable batteries for quick inventory/retrieval.
• Track overdues and tell exactly where items are if needed quickly and not “on the shelf”
• Tell a patron that all peripherals he/she borrowed with, say,  the camera, are back – or exactly which items are missing from the bag. The quicker identified, the better the chances of recovery. Small items not immediately identified slip off everyone’s radar.
• Identify recalcitrent borrows (actually, recalcitrant “returners”)
• Inventory quickly and easily using barcode technology
• Plan for repair and replacement

Having said all this, the really difficult part of “managing” peripherals is likely to be in managing to impart real learning around their use. To begin with, the devices need to have a demonstrable teaching or learning purpose.  While this may seem a no-brainer, why is it that I still see teachers insisting, for example, that they need a boom-mike for the camera they are going to send out with a pair of kids that have never used one? What are the kids going to learn from an experience doomed to failure on any one of several levels?

Secondly, using peripherals for effective learning can be possible where there is true peripheral ubiquity, but what personally owned device today can claim that? While virtually every HS student at our school carries a cellphone, for example,  and while a growing number of these are iPhones, not ALL are. And so the idea of using cellphones to promote learning indeed does seems to me to be “a blatantly self-serving maneuver to break into the big educational market.”

Competing platforms, whether they be cellphones, cameras or alternative-format recorders, have differing technical capabilities (1MegaPixes vs. 2 MP cameras, rates of internet browse, wireless protocols, etc), different connection and download strategies (USB, infrared, BlueTooth, Wireless Ethernet) and different physical connectors.  Even the ubiquitous USB cable comes with a half-dozen different proprietary brand connectors.

Until there is some form of universal standardization of communications standards, data-sharing protocols and physical connectivity issues, it seems to me that the issue of managing peripherals in the classroom will continue to bedevil educators.

And so, I predict that even in the heady atmosphere of the aspiring “web2.0″ school, technology integration at the “rubber-meets-road” level will continue to follow the bell curve of Innovation, including;

• the chaos of  ad-hoc adoption by the  Innovators
• the creative but messy alloying of new tools by the Early Adopters
• the triaging of many failed innovations by trolling for successes by the Early Majority,
• the final tempering of the few lucky evolutionary survivors by the Late Majority, and
• the disregard for any potential use by the Laggards.

Or, to put it another way;

Image courtesy of Creativityatwork.com. Adapted from Satir Change Model.

Exponential change is usually represented by a curve rising to the vertical, but another way of looking at it is that we’re at the brink of a precipice of exponential change . We’re unlikely to avoid in the near term, falling over the edge and going through the ensuing turmoil of reaching for a new status quo.

The problem is that with this  change environment increasingly facing all fields of human endeavor, there are precipitously few opportunities to reach any kind of new Status Quo in any one of them, much less in some unified amalgam of all. We are doomed, it seems,  to repeat an endless cycle of chaos and rebirth, chaos and rebirth of “best-yet” innovations. The challenge, to throw another metaphor into the mix, is to look beyond the forest to the individual trees to be sure they don’t begin to all look the same in the end…

…and to check if one’s been spiked  – with  a horseshoe nail…

What are ways you manage the use of laptops in your classroom and what additional best practice ways might you add?

In ISB’s Main Library, we’ve always prided ourselves on being, if not on the “cutting edge” of new technology use in supporting school curricula, at least skating somewhere near that edge.  Five years ago, we began using wireless laptops as our primary computer platform in the main library, at the same time we adopted a “laptop cart” model of laptop access throughout ISB’s Middle and High Schools. We now house 72 laptops in 6 sets of 12 machines available for students to check out for use in the Main Library itself. Two sets live at the Circulation Desk, available for Drop-in student use on surrendering their ID card. Two set live in carts nominally assigned to MS and HS respectively, and provided without restriction (but on a 1st-come, 1st-served) basis, to classes booked into the library. The final two sets live in our “Webroom”, the attached Seminar Room which serves as HS Student Council homebase, preferred public meeting space, and occasional booked library class.

It’s not a perfect situation – by far. Too often, students arriving at the library somewhat into the period are told that all Circulation laptops are on loan and carts are being reserved for classes booked to arrive “soon”. Or ALL machines are on reserve in anticipation of three or more overlaping MS and HS classes arriving at some point in the period. Or finally, they arrive to find all Circulaition machines on charge, having been used for the full preceding period. Or, or. or…

The bottom line is that the average laptop in the Main LIbrary is circulated 6-7 times in a school day with an average use time of around 20 minutes  when short morning and lunch turnarounds are factored in – a total of  120 to 150 minutes of active use. That’s less than 3 hours of active use for each of the 72  laptops in the Main Library.

On the flip side, the 72 laptops in Main Library (buttressed by a dozen walkup Catalog and PowerSchool “Quick Reference” stations are available to only those students who actually avail themselves of the services of the Main Library. While we are pleased to serve more than 1200 visitors in an average day, the majority of these are repeat visitors; students, teachers – and even parents – who have “adopted” the library as their primary work, study, or simply “hangout” spot when not actively engaged in classes, sports or extracurricular activities.

So why is this a problem? Because there are – literally hundreds – of students, who in today’s “wired” teaching and learning environment, never receive any benefit from the significant investment in hardware and infrastructure that go into operating our Main Library – because, unless in a class booked into the library by their teacher, they seldom, or perhaps even never, come to the library.  At the same time, there are periods when up to a full 48 of our 72 laptops go unused in anticipation of classes who may not arrive, while reports of laptop shortages in classrooms looking for hardware are growing in number. It’s a situation with no clear resolution with the current model of shared laptop carts for “on-demand” use.

Compare this to the potential use if we were a 1:1 school, with a laptop assigned to each student.

• A recent report on the 1:1 laptop program at the Denver School of Science and Technology cites almost universal positive results for the program, with enhance frequency of use by students and teachers, and positive attitudes to these uses overwhelmingly reported
• A report on Henrico County Public Schools (Virginia) 1:1 laptop initiative through 2007-08 reports, “Students who made more use of laptops had higher scores in World History, Biology, Reading and Chemistry” and that ”Students say that because of the laptops, they are “learning more”. Virtually every student-reported application of their laptops is stronger this year last.  For example, students continue to believe that school is more fun and that they are more interested in school because of the laptops
• Dr. Peter Anthony of the Canadian Academy in Kobe, Japan, reports all of the above, as well as Broadening Learning Beyond the Classroom and Preparing for Tomorrow’s Workplace in a blog posting documenting his observations in the International School Setting.

***

There’s always the fear, in k-12 education, as in any front-weighted program with far-reaching implications, that a strategy that looks great on paper will translate poorly into practice, or worse, having taken 3-4 years to implement, will prove to have been actually counterproductive to the business at hand.

The business at hand? Supporting the Vision and Guiding principles of the school, of course. At ISB, our VaGP can be distilled down to the the ISB21′ group’s Vision for 21st Century Literacy and that vision can be shown to fit neatly within the context of the ISB Vision and Guiding Principles through this embedded diagram.

The fear? That the current mode of laptop use at ISB will turn out to have not best met the needs of the learners that have passed through our doors in the past 5 years. And the technology needs of a whole cohort of HS students, at least, have not been as effectively provided for as they should have been.

But then again, as our Peer Coaching instructor Dr. Jim Olivera used to tell us, the best we can offer is to never waver in the pursuit of “the best yet”.  The wireless laptop model we’ve used since 2004 was the “best-yet” we could come up with then. Perhaps 2010 will be the time to begin the move to 1:1…

How relevant are the NETs for Teachers and Administrators to being a “Good Educator” today?

For the record, from my perspective, standards are key to the development, implementation and continued growth and development of any quality program, whether it be home-building to an evolving set of environmental conditions or maintaining a robust and relevant teaching and learning program for a technologically evolving learner population.

I’m confident that the new NETs Standards are as as good as anything currently out there, although I’m impressed with the current work in Social Studies now known as technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge, or TPACK (cited in SUNY#2). Of course, I’m biased, and since both the new NETs Standards and the new AASL standards were rolled out in same year (2007), but then the AASL initial release was buttressed by the much more prescriptive 2008 Standards for the 21st Century Learner in Action (eg. Benchmarks to Achieve by Grade 10), I would have to say that while both are highly relevant to “being a good educator” in the shifting teaching/learning environment of this opening decade of the 21st century, if I were forced to choose one, it would be the AASL standards.

To be honest, I loved the simple, clean lines of the original NETs (2007) standards, and I thought the representative diagram for those to be by far superior.

Compare this;

to this;       

The NETs graphic looks just more “21st-century”: like the stylized Pioneer Plaque, it’s message is meant to be intuitive and for. By comaparison, the AASL cover is just too “20th century”, the title notwithstanding. Now why didn’t the two just put their heads together and create the best of both worlds?

Unfortunately, the NETs standards miss a key component of what I believe will turn today’s learner into tomorrow’s leader. That piece is (perhaps it’s the librarian in me) most of Standard #4; Pursue Personal and Aesthetic Growth.

At ISB, we have our own version of “blended” standards, based on the work of our “ISB21″ team over the past year, but for my money, nothing in the NETs standards speaks as eloquently to the need for students today to reclaim that “love of learning” that is so integral in the development of true scholarship as the  AASL Benchmarks to Standard #4.

As a school librarian, while I will support and promote “TAIL” standards we are developing at ISB, I will need to keep a close eye over the coming months, on how my colleagues in the library world are handling this. Be true to you school, the Beach Boys said in 1964 – and it’s still true –  Be True to your School - but to which school?

How can teachers and schools ensure that their students are learning what they need when it comes to Technology and Information Literacy?

The simple answer might be to ensure accountability for meeting basic learning standards following a “Scope and Sequence” of appropriate skills. But, of course, it’s not that simple. For the sake of some simplification, I’ve focussed on the teaching (and learning) of “Social Studies” in the following observations. I’m confident, though, that I’d find the same story were I to research the “teaching” of English, Modern Languages, or Mathematics. And as for studying “Information Literacy” for its own sake? It’s better left unsaid…

But back to the infamous “Scope and Sequence” of skills – for any discipline. First of all, the term has been in and out of vogue forever. At the heart of it, it’s all about accountability – and like the proverbial bad penny, the term has turned up in the wake of progressive movements ever since I threw my hat in the ring in the early ’70s. Secondly, though, typical Scope and Sequence charts from “back in the day” were firmly rooted in Content, rather than Process and Information literacy was generally much too ill-defined to warrant much more than passing mention, whileTechnology, if mentioned at all, was all about the specific tools in the spotlight at the moment.

But finally, the main problem with the typical “Scope and Sequence” chart from the post-WWII era was that it was too prescriptive. Teachers objected to being dictated to, particularly when this involved “elective” skills appropriate at different stages, teachable using different instructional strategies, or using a variety of teaching tools. Not only that, but early on, people recognized that not every student would be successful in an environment where the sequence, pace and depth of skills taught were dictated by a set of set-in-stone bulleted items.

In the 70’s, when I got into the business, the  new educational panacea was “Open-Area education“. Students were encouraged to participate in the setting of their own educational goals. Our model to aspire to was Summerhill, a “student-centered” school in England where kids set their own educational agendas, and adults were truly just “guides on the side” to assist those on their journey. In this “student-centered” setting, Information Literacy was just a catch-phrase, and Technology usually not considered at all in the rush to meet individualized “student-generated” needs.

In a pendulum swing away from the prescriptiveness of the post-war scope and sequences, the Elephant in the Open (Class)Room was the lack of assurance that, left to their own devices, students would make wise choices about the scope or depth of studies in which they should engage. By the eighties, temporary, and then permanent walls were being erected in the many “Open-Area” schools built during the rush to that concept ten years earlier.

The blank concrete-block walls of these Free-choice factories still dot the landscape of Canadian small-towns today. The site my own first paid teaching post, where I made a last-stand attempt to promote “Open-Area” ideas to a team of traditionally trained educators, sits mutely beside my parents’ house in my hometown. The walls went up in the Eighties and never came down. In the end, it turned out, Open-Area education simply caved in to  ”a call for increased structure and formal accountability.”

Along with the walls came, in the Eighties, the “Back to Basics” movement in Canadian public-school education. Standardized testing reigned surpreme and Madeline Hunter’s “Instructional Theory into Practice” ruled the day. The catchphrase was “monitor and adjust”. Of course, what we were “adjusting” to was largely student achievement on the externally imposed Canadian Test of Basic Skills and several others whose name I mercifully forget. To effectively “deliver” the skills needed to meet these external imposed tests, Scope and Sequence charts of skills to be “taught” were surrepticiously dug out of the desk drawers where they had languished during the Open-Area years.

In 1988, the New York Times published an article with the banner headline, “Schools’ Back to Basics Movement Found to be Working in Math.” (I didn’t take the time to find if similar “reports” on the teaching of Social Studies, but I’m sure they’re out there). It was along about this time that I bailed out of the Canadian system and sought my fortune in the international schools network.

Of course, changing the setting didn’t really change  much. In 1991, the NCSS published a report entitled “Social Studies in the Middle School” in which one of the key tenets was – “Designing a Scope and Sequence for the 21st Century.” The Nineties was the decade of Peer Coaching and Individualized Instruction. Our mentor in the wilds of Thailand was an educational guru from California who brought us the  “Best-Yet”phrase to describe our efforts to meet the changing needs of an increasingly technologically sophisticated student population.

The Nineties was, of course, when the Internet arrived to change the face of education (and life, for that matter) for ever. The “best-yet” of 1995 quickly became the “been-there, done-that” of 1997 – and 2000 – and 2005 – but accountability’s still the holy grail of  “best-yet” educational practice. And accountability usually meant enabling students to achieve acceptably high (higher than world-average, of course, in an exclusive International college-prep day school) grades in an increasingly technology-based set of external assessments.

There appears to be hope. In in the 2009 article “Giving, Prompting, Making: Aligning Technology and Pedagogy Within TPACK for Social Studies Instruction” published in “Contemporary Issues in Technology and Social Studies Teacher Education”, there’s a wonderful graphic of the idealized process of Teaching Social Studies today;

But does it seem that this stylized “best-yet” model actually being put into practice? Well, unfortunately, perhpas not. Good Golly, Miss Molly, it’s 2009, and what do we see “turning up again”. Why, it’s an (otherwise unidentified, but likely representative of the field) Scope and Sequence – Eleventh Grad American History. Oddly, though, in the whole 5 page document, there’s no mention of Technology, or for that matter, of  Teaching Pedagogy or of Learning. There are just 5 pages of highly prescriptive, content-specific sequential events to be covered – and then tested.

How can teachers and schools ensure that their students are learning what they need when it comes to Technology and Information Literacy when the two are not even referenced together in the current guiding literature for the subject?

My apologies again to my Social Studies teaching colleague (and again, the disclaimer that the same is almost certainly true in every discipline), but how inconsistent with “Best Practice” is that?