Innagication

I just read an article in The Palm Beach Post raising oft asked question of whether or not technology in the classroom is a good thing. More accurately, it explores whether or not it should be a (monetary) priority. I’m pretty sure my perspective on the matter is known. Most of the article was right on target. They focused mainly on two pieces of technology: interactive student response remotes and wireless tablets, both of which I have used in my classes. I really appreciated that the main interviewees were math teachers; we often get forgotten about. Some of the pros and cons of both technologies were acknowledged, all of which I agree with (yes, even the cons).
What struck me enough to write about it was the last two sentences:

“You’re still seeing a human being explain and interpret,” Samore said. “The teacher is still front and center.”

Doh! The big AHA! about using technology in the classroom is it gives the teacher the ability to step out of the spotlight and put each student front and center for the sake of their own learning. They construct knowledge through the research and creation that the technology allows. Even with interactive student response remotes and tablets, students can control the flow of the discussion and do the demonstrating and explaining. Don’t get me wrong: there needs to be an expert in the room (I don’t want to write myself out of a job) – they just don’t need to do all of the talking ‘front and center’.

I just read an article here with the headline,

Low-tech classrooms may actually improve students’ math scores
Math skills — Limiting technology early on could help develop basic math skills

As a math teacher and an educational technologist, I was intrigued. I have found that technology has invigorated my math lessons, allowing my students to manipulate and visualize abstract concepts. The big Aha! for me was the sentence,

Although her research uncovered other findings that may account for high Japanese math scores — including highly competent educators, meaningful leading questions and more time for processing — the results also point to the possible benefits of limiting, or outright banning, technology in the classroom.

It doesn’t surprise me that highly competent educators asking meaningful leading questions and providing sufficient processing time are getting good results. Good teachers get good results everywhere – not just Japan.

I wonder if they infused a bit of technology in meaningful ways if their results would be even better? Are our students’ choices good teachers or technology? Can’t there be both?

Sorry about the long post title.

I just read that a UK school has enlisted Indian maths tutors online on BBC News. This could totally integrate with my previous idea of focusing on single classroom, big idea project based learning. When some heavy lifting needs to be done and there isn’t an embedded subject specialist with which to team-teach, something like this could be used to give the kids the differentiated, one-on-one learning experience they need.

Love it!

A big shout-out to The Dalian Maple Leaf School!

I did a whirlwind 24 hour fly-in-to-fly-out-of Dalian in the Liaoning province to facilitate a workshop on the TI-84+ calculator.  It was an amazing 4 hours in which I learned from the participants and truly hope that they learned from me.  I think I first started to get the vibe that it was going well when I offered a break for a second time and was told, “No, we’re good; you can keep going.”  I was having so much fun that I never took a break, though I encouraged those that needed or want to to come and go as they so desired.  There were some that not only never left, but came and chatted with me at the end (which, I think caused some stress to the workshop organizer, who was trying to get me to start moving toward the airport – oops).  I have often heard that teachers can be the worst students.  This particular group of teachers make that extremely hard to believe.  They were engaged, fueling the discussion with their ideas and questions and awesomely collaborative, helping each other here-and-there.

It all really supported something I already knew: It is easy to get excited about personal technology.  It is not only fun to play with and explore and discover, but the fact that it is personal means that it is up to the learner how to go about doing so.

The personal graphing calculator (AKA graphic display calculator or GDC) in math was the original kid on the one-to-one block.  It has all of those cool benefits mentioned above about personal technology in general, not to mention it is tactile, tapping another part of the brain.  I know one has to touch a laptop as well, but the GDC is held in the hands – its different.  If you are a math teacher and just use it for routine calculations and graphing, your students are missing out.  TI has loads of learning activities on their activities exchange that exploit their calculators as a tool to explore.

I’m reminded that laptop/web-based tools are not the be-all-end-all when it comes to using technology in the classroom and just because your school isn’t a one-to-one laptop school doesn’t mean that you can’t embrace technology and integrate in to your teaching-and-learning.  It has a way of capturing an audience and encouraging the mind to do so very much.

On birthdays and Christmas growing up, it didn’t take me long to figure out the coolest of the features of new toys…we can incite the same ‘gotta figure it out’ emotion when we use any technology in the classroom – not just math and not just laptops and calculators.

So I’ve been doing a bit more leisure reading as I am on holiday and I’ve come across a few things that I want to write about. First I read in The Economist that NASA’s plan to return to the moon has been scrapped in the new budget.  This disappoints me.  I think, and I am no economist, that this is the type of program that should be nurtured, not trashed, to revive the economy.  Not only does it create jobs, but it has the domino effect of inspiring this generation of learners to pursue engineering and other sciences, which will then stimulate the education industry as well as, most probably, lead to new innovations that could better society (think microwave ovens and Velcro).  True, NASA isn’t shut down, it is just refocused to more attainable goals.  Maybe it is the Sci-Fi buff in me that really likes the big dream….it inspires me.  I have worked with High School Aerospace Scholars in the past and am curious how this impacts that program, as it was centered on the long-term mission to Mars.

Secondly, I read in Wired (UK), about sports performance indicator (SPI) monitors, gesture interfaces and personalized advertising and immediately thought of some cool ways these could impact education.  SPI monitors combine GPS, heart rate monitor, digital compass, gyroscope and accelerometer in one device about the size of a deck of cards.  The math teacher in me gets excited about all of the real-world data collection that could be done and used to develop some really cool models (mathematical, that is).  This type of data collecting is not new: Texas Instruments and Vernier have been designing devices for years now to get data into student’s hands, but the size, and in turn manageability, of this device excites me.  The piece on gesture interfaces and personalized advertising focused on Schematic, a design company in London and LA.  From the two paragraph blurb, I gather that the research interface used by Tom Cruise and the personal recognition and subsequent recommendations by advertising displays in Minority Report are almost a reality.  Why do I think it is so cool for education?  What if teachers could model inquiry and research skills for students by grabbing, modifying, and twisting ‘ideas’ at a giant display board?  Forget PowerPoint presentations, ‘lecture’ content would be created on-the-spot and influenced by the class discussion.  Regarding the personalized advertising, student ID badges are already being chipped with RFID tags, what if personalized daily announcements could be delivered on the bus ride to school as soon as a student sat down in a seat (I’m picturing in seat displays like on airplanes), or school libraries start making recommendations via walk-up kiosks?  I’m sure there are more (and more refined) possibilities, but I’m seeing school for The Jetsons.

Before I moved overseas, I had a great garage. Besides housing my Jeep Wrangler that I miss more than words can convey, I had more tools than you could shake a stick at (please pardon the poor grammar for the sake of the colloquialism). What was really great about all of those tools was that when I had a task which I wanted to accomplish (i.e. fix something I broke) I often had just the right tool for the job. This was great because it made the job really easy. Well, in theory, at least. Many of the jobs could have been done with the not-quite-perfect tool, but it was so much easier to get it done with just the right tool. This had one caveat: Much to my wife’s chagrin, my tool collection grew, and grew…and grew. On the one hand, it gave me lots of options. On the other hand, it could become quite the storage and organizational problem. I find that I have a similar situation with technology tools, both inside and outside of the classroom. I have more and more tools, to the point that I sometimes forget what tools I have. It is not uncommon that I am only reminded of a tool that I have after I am faced with a particular problem. This has led me to two realizations.

One, a catalog for the tools is a good idea. Funny enough, a few tools to do this come to mind. For web-based tools or those that have a web-presence (i.e. a software publisher’s website) a social bookmarking utility like delicious.com would be good. For hardware, a well organized cabinet might be nice.

My second epiphany is that going to conferences and ‘collecting tools’ is a good practice, but unless I at least use the tool once before putting it in my mental tool cabinet, I will probably forget about it before I actually get a chance to use it or, more importantly, recommending it to a colleague. This of course follows the metaphor, as anyone who collects tools probably also participates in the age-old practice of loaning them to friends. This brings a new idea to the table: If you don’t feel like you have many tools, or are not sure you have the best tool for the job at hand, you can ‘barrow’ someone else’s tool by searching their delicious bookmarks or soliciting help from your PLN via Ning, Facebook or Twitter.

I miss my garage, but just as I used to go to Home Depot and browse for new tools to find my Zen, I now catch up on my Google Reader and hit my Nings.