Edging Ahead…

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.

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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?

I’ve blogged about this before.  Of course, at the time, we were looking at Online Safety. But the rationale is the same. Standards, like Safety, have to be embedded in the very Fabric of what we do. It’s everyone’s job. Swap out “Standards” for “Online Safety” and you get;

Essential Question: Who’s job is it to teach the NETs and AASL standards to students?

It’s Everyone’s Responsibility (if we decide that NETs and AASL standards are what we aspire to, that is).

• Everyone
• Everyone teaching
• Everyone teaching kids
• Everyone teaching kids to standards
• Everyone teaching kids to online standards
• Everyone teaching kids to standards
• Everyone teaching kids
• Everyone teaching
• Everyone…

So who’s “everyone”? Everyone is;

• the classroom teacher who faces the kids day to day)
• the special-subject teacher (Health, PE, etc, who meet the kids at intervals)
• the support specialist (Technology, Information Literacy, who largely support teachers)
• the counsellors, who support the kids in meeting teachers’ expectations
• the administration (who oversee those who meet the kids f2f)
• the parents, who trust the schools to set “the standards”

And that, of course, begs the question, “Who’s job is it to SET the standards?”

But that’s a question for another day.

 How has the explosion of web-based video changed the teaching and learning landscape?

In a nutshell, the explosion of web-based video is literally ejecting the teaching and learning landscape into a whole new trajectory: and it’s like an unstoppable, solid-rocket boost rather than a jet’s vigorous thrust, a turboprob’s gentle urging, or a prop-engine’s noisycajoling its payload forward.

The new  teaching and learning environment, in which lessons, examples, experiments and speculative meanderings are all freely available, in equal measure, to both teacher and learner, puts education on a laissez-faire footing not seen since Socrates schooled his charges.

It may be that technology is finally able to help bridge the divide between the teacher and the learner. For the one billion lucky enough to have access to the tools that brought us web-based video who are truly interested in being learners, there is no limit to what they might achieve.

Frankly, though, at the real interface of teaching and learning, where 20th-century schooled and trained teachers still guide “digital-native” students, the story is a bit more mundane.

Examples?

United Streaming

Three years ago, we licensed United Streaming, just as is it was becoming Discovery Streaming.

The promise of Discovery Streaming was seductive. In 2007, The International Society for Technology in Education completed review of the Discovery Education unitedstreaming and determined that the program clearly supports the implementation of the ISTE National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for Students.

Combined with the size of the video database (40,000 videos and clips), focussed content (short clips to full-length videos), and the ubiquity of access through the web, it seemed that streaming video would render DVD obsolete before it could ever becom a media standard.

Then, when some of its limitations, such as download issues regarding firewalls and bandwidth, began to become apparent just as YouTube was taking off, offering FREE content on almost any topic imaginable, the luster of a paid service like DS quickly waned.

When we declined to renew the license after two years to only a handful of almost wistful emails of concern, the handwriting was on the wall. Expensive subscription databases, whether for periodicals, fulltext reference services, or media, are an endangered species.

Enter YouTube

YouTube is the first, I suspect, of a whole new paradigm for personal expression. Where generations of scribblers once wrote for a tiny chosen readership, now everyone from aspiring academics and eclectic entrepreneurs to downy-eyed dreamers and silicone snake-oil salesmen can vomit out their beliefs, biases, and unpolished pitches to the cold Crystal Eye of the webcam. Every subject imaginable has been covered, with many points of view cleverly explored. There is truly something for everyone on the web, and now it’s available in full motion glory. For the truly committed, web-based video is the new Information El Dorado.

Model on display in the Gold Museum, Bogotá, Colombia

So what’s wrong with this Picture?

Sure, it’s distorted but more important is the signal-to-noise ratio. In an environment where so much is unpolished, unfinished, inaccurate, or deliberately misleading, how can a data-miner be sure he or she is following a true high-grade vein of information?

There is so much on YouTube truly not worth the time to access that it makes the paucity of  authoritative print material on the open web seem like the Mother Lode by comparison.

In a world where we are constantly bombarded with more conflicting information, more contradicting scientific conclusions, and much, much more raw data all the time, who has time to troll through the endless files of dross that make up the bulk of YouTube?

By the time you locate a promising file, download it so you can play it uninterrupted (for those  still in the “third-world” of information access speed) and then play to evaluate it for authority, bias, content and currency, you can often have just created something yourself of equal value.

Undeniable, however, has been streaming video’s  impact on the market for other media formats.  Three years after purchasing our first DVDs and now having “officialy” retired our VHS collection, we are already faced with the next generation media storage. We are still buying DVD’s, but at one time we owned 5,000 VHS titles, while after three years we still have only around 1,000 DVDs. Because of the need to migrate to both new media (BlueRay?) and compatible players, it is likely that HD-DVD will remain almost unused in the near future.

The reason? FREE streaming video. Aside from the the ubiquitous YouTube, free video content is available from everything from CNN and ESPN feeds to Indie developers to professional blogs. On the Environment, for example

YouTube (What’s the Worst that Can Happen? Greg Craven, Indepent teacher & author)

Democracy Now (Fracking and the Environment. Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica)

TED Talks (What’s Wrong with What we Eat? Mark Bittman, NYTimes Food Writer)

Of course, it’s important to not  limit oneself to one’s own personal favorites, be it the Age or Ted Talks. That way lies the same one-trick ponyism that many tech afficianados fall prey to (“Read these blogs and  you’ll never go wrong”).

The answer may be in a next-generation Google that can truly and “intelligently” sift through the mountain of visual verbiage (if a picture’s worth a thousand words, what’s a minute of 30fps video worth?). But until the new Google truly rises phoenixlike from the ashes of the best of the text-dependent search algorithm web-crawlers, web-based video will still be a poor-man’s information side-show, the domain of the “truly committed” or the “obsessed”. 

The Onion (Taco Bell’s New Green Menu takes no Ingredients from Nature) 

Hmmm…