Is it really that shocking? Technology and academics together

Earlier this year had to complete an assignment for my graduate class that proposed an action plan related to impacting student achievement.  I outlined the implementation of technology curriculum directly into the academic classrooms of our skill-based program from students with learning disabilities.  This plan laid out a interweaving of technology standards and direct instruction within the academic area standards to provide greater utilization of technology as a means of acquiring and demonstrating knowledge in the classroom.

“Media literacy is an important topic to be integrated throughout the curriculum so that every student has the opportunity to become actively engaged in learning about it multiple ways throughout each school year.” (Swaim, 2002)

The plan seemed so commonsensical.  The idea developed out of a series of conversations with the Director of Curriculum at my school, and seemed so logical in its development.  As academic technology coordinator, I would develop goals and objects based on state standards and then work with the other department heads to develop technology based projects for their academic areas to meet goals for both domains.  The ultimate goal to have greater technology instruction woven in to demonstrate purpose and provide dual direct instruction to benefit the acquisition of skills.

My plan followed the mission of my school, “..to help children with learning disabilities develop a foundation of skills, gain an understanding of their abilities, and prepare for a more traditional program.” (Eagle Hill Southport), as well as the mission of the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), “To expand learning opportunities for all individuals, especially those with disabilities, through research and development of innovative, technology-based educational resources and strategies.”

So much to my surprise, my professor felt this plan was of key importance and that I should publish an article based on my rationale.  I did not find my ideas, foundation of points, or thoughts to be so innovative, but just good practice.  Apparently, maybe good practice in my eyes is different as I teach in an ideal setting of being able to be create the optimal learning opportunities for my students without many restrictions.  My school does best practice on a daily basis to provide for our students, and I do think that what we do, while not innovative, is unique in its actual implementation.  So maybe after all my time there, my ideas are something outside the norm of traditional practice.  That saddens me for public education.  So now I explore the idea of submitting an article.

As Alan November (2011) says, “The whole capacity to pick a specific curricular area, such as reading, and building a plan around that makes sense to me.  Too often what I see is technology for technology’s sake…Whatever the technology du jour is, you know, we’ll have our next favorite technology.  So, extending beyond that, the vision absolutely comes first, then the technology.  It is not the other way around.”  

The ideas are out there, maybe I can join with those that have the same vision and bring it into practice.  How do you utilize technology in your school and classrooms? 

Alan November, http://novemberlearning.com/, 2011

Sue Swaim, Executive Director, National Middle School Association

Telemedium, The Journal of Media Literacy, Vol. 48, No. 2, Fall 2002

Technology…multisenory learning?

I had an interesting conversation recently with our school psychologist, Dave, who works at our sister school a few towns over.  They adopt technology a bit quicker than we do, with a 1-1 laptop program for the upper school and a full school adoption of interactive whiteboards a few years ago.

So he came into my first period recently and was asking my class questions concerning our interactive board…the only one in the building and installed this past summer.  My students love it!  I couldn’t figure where Dave’s questioning was going.

Working with our student population…students with learning disabilities, in a transitional skill based program…multi-sensory learning with consideration for all modalities (verbal, auditory, kinesthetic) is very key to our instruction.  

So again…I am lost as to his questioning….then it becomes clear…Dave states that with the focus to use the interactive whiteboard, there has been a decrease in traditional hands on activities.  Are we truly doing less multi-sensory teaching?

Is the interaction with the whiteboard multi-modal?  While it is interactive…how many dimensions are you really interacting with?  This was Dave’s point, is the interactive whiteboard as multi-modal as you would assume?  It does have many bells and whistles, it is interactive like a video game, however what does it require of the student’s modalities?

Interactive boards are very visual, can be auditory, but are they truly kinesthetic?  This is a fine line.  Students can touch them, they can move objects, they can write on them, but take a game my math class loves where they touch dice to roll them, and then multiple them.  Which is more interactive, touching an image that rolls or actually rolling dice? Doing a word sort, is moving words to a column on the board, where feedback is immediate, or doing a word sort where the answer is not immediately acknowledge, but more thought is required to ensure accuracy a more interactive activity?

I think of board games versus video games…which requires more interaction, more effort?  This could be argued both ways; however, interaction involved with technology is really between the technology and one person…where an actual hands on activity, involves more interaction with others and tactile feedback.  Without technology there is often less immediate feedback, which means there needs to be more thought on the students part before ensuring accuracy, meaning more metacognition required.

The interactive board has added a lot to my classroom, but it is also not the only tool I use for learning.  This conversation with Dave was crucial to reinforce the need to keep our traditional activities to support learning, that full adoption of interactive boards is not necessarily the best for learning.  Teachers need to utilize these tools with care to the fact that traditional, tried and true practices are not to be left behind.

As we move forward to 21st century practices, we need to remember that there are educational practices that have been used without technology that are just as effective, if not more.  Any tool used in the classroom needs to be to the benefit of the whole student, whether requiring electricity or not.

edmodo

Thank you  for letting me present on my use of edmodo in class. It has quickly become an integral part of my classroom.

You can learn more about it on edmodo’s site here.

Please feel free to contact me anytime with questions or concerns!

Best,

David Saunders

CAIS Academic Tech Retreat Never Disappoints!

For the past seven years, amidst the craziness and mad dash to the end of the school year, there is a bright light. This light is called the CAIS Academic Tech Retreat and it is the most amazing, relaxing, and rejuvenating 2 days for me, both professionally and personally. It is held at the Trinity Conference Center in West Cornwall, CT. The setting is beautiful, the food is spectacular and the company is second to none. (I wrote about this last year too!)  The retreat is an “un-conference“, which lends itself nicely to attendees getting exactly what they need/want out of the two days.

We always begin with a keynote. This year’s was fabulous thanks to Ann Befroy from Miss Porter’s School!

Keynote: A Communicative Approach to the Flipped Classroom Ann Befroy, Miss Porter’s School How do current technologies allow teachers to structure a flipped classroom that promotes effective language learning both in and out of the classroom? Can students really learn grammar on their own outside of class? What critical thinking skills are encouraged by using the flipped classroom? Watch as Ann Befroy teaches us how the flipped classroom can enhance best practices for language instruction, then take some time to figure out how this approach might work best with your faculty.

Here are some of my notes/ tweets from her talk.

Up next was a Web 2.0/ App SMACKDOWN. Here is the list we came up with for recommended, must-have apps and web tools. Some great resources here curated in under an hour. Feel free to add to it if you have any to share!

Then… on to the unconference. Here is our session board. As you can see, there was a wide variety of topics and a lot of learning/ sharing / exploration took place. I love the fact that we could put a topic up on the board, with no “expert” in the room, and have time to dig into it. We did this with QR codes,  Google+, Pinterest among others. One group even had a session to explore Garage Band. They created an original song using a blend of traditional and digital instruments. Check it out!  LMAO BYOD   Hysterical!!!

Other highlights of the retreat include academic technology guitarists having a jam session, learning how to play the ocarina and tech charades/ pictionary. This year, it was a little chilly so, instead of sitting on the porch, we sat by a roaring fire. Here are some photo highlights. (and check out this iCade– use your iPad to create an arcade!) COOL!

          

Here is an archive of some of my other tweets throughout the retreat. Here is an archive of #caisct tweets .

Thanks to everyone who attended, shared and learned with me.  It’s just what I needed to get to the finish line!

Note: This is a cross post from my personal blog. 

Millennials/ Gen Z Workshop- Summary Report

• A Field Report From Teaching Millennials/ Gen Z. Students, April 17, 2012,
• Hamden Hall Country Day School, Hamden, CT.  
• Presenters (in order of appearance):
• William Hunter, Hamden Hall, Topical Introduction (w/remarks, below)
• Lorri Caroll, Hamden Hall IT Director, Diigo and Research Coordination
• Sarah Ludwig, Hamden Hall Librarian, Evernote and Seamless Note-Taking
• Kirby Mahoney, St. Thomas’s Day School, LS Project-Based Video Development
• Marek Beck, Greenwich Country Day, Wikis as Key to Classroom Management
• Dave Saunders, Greenwich Country Day, Edmodo as Homework Organizational Tool

My Opening Remarks… Undelivered, A bit Unnecessary perhaps, Yet an Oblique Entry Into the Topic… Followed by the PowerPoint I did use as Introduction on 4/17:

Peering over the top of someone’s head while waiting at Starbuck’s, where we teachers ought to own stock, by the way, I witnessed a poor shlump much like myself bent over a set of student essays.  I couldn’t help but notice the title of the essay on top, in 88 font, and, for some reason, pink letters, “IT EXISTS!”  it proclaimed, presumably some sort of epistemology essay on perhaps a veiled attack on modern urban planning.

I lingered on the size of the assertion for some time, in fact, perhaps because it was getting close to the time to start choosing my opening salvo for this workshop, and what tack was I going to take into the forests of the future which our current students will own much more than we, these children now of Gen Y students I taught in my first decade in the ‘80’s beginning now to show up in my ninth grade classroom?  “It exists!” I thought to myself, that’s it!  Not the concept itself, since I’ve been fairly cognizant of the earth’s immanence, its existence, since that first fall off the jungle gym, back when they were tolerated despite the injuries, way back when.  No, it was the need for such a huge font that struck me, maybe the pink even, as if there were a whole crowd of skinny jeans and black t-shirt wearing Millennial/Gen Z’s (as I will call this combined crowd of youth age 8-22) who were either doubtful or in denial—willfully so, as if there were indeed a beast at the door called “reality” which it made great sense to bar from entering—maybe forever.  After all, who bore these children and young adults into the lap of affluence into which a ticking bomb has been tossed, one of population glut, climate change already, at 1 degree hotter, bringing multi-teethed tornados to the Midwest ten months a year and third-world drought that can in no way contain the flood waters that carry whole communities downstream in a matter of three or four hours—and this, at one degree, when Bill McKibben at Middlebury and a raft of others see an inexorable rise of at least 4-6 degrees before we can turn things around—that is, if we start tomorrow taxing carbon emissions and cutting back on air flight and smokestack emissions, taking three days off from appliance use every week and so on, limiting travel on weekends and holidays, and so on.  Yes, to restate this question: Who bore these children– to face what “reality challenges” ahead?

Yes, it does Exist– Virginia, in fact, New York, California, Atlanta, Dallas, and so do our Millennial Z students, who are perhaps more aware even than we were, in the days before bullying and name-calling were punishable offenses, that even their protected existence does not, in the words of Stephen Crane, trigger in the universe any “particular sense of obligation” towards them.  We knew this back in the ‘60s and ‘70’s in fact, and grew bitter at the fundamental injustice of life during the Vietnam War– but there was no escape hatch to turn inward, at least en masse, onto social media and everlasting chat, away from the real world that still, in fact, as our coffeehouse essay put it, “exists”.   And yet, of course, in a fundamental irony, back then we attempted at least to expect things of the reality beyond ourselves, hoping that its indubitable existence might be an incentive, in fact, for it to behave, this reality we shared, by leaving Vietnam and giving us peace instead.  And so we insisted, and so it came to pass, the existence of reality carrying with it no excuse but instead some sort of obligation that certain (hopefully justice-based) requirements must come as a part of its license– that it must at least reflect on its actions, this reality to which we were all subjected, that we had such hopes for.

Now, it’s the soft power of the electronic age that seems much more inexorable than a morally bankrupt war halfway around the world, as if it were indeed a fact of life far into the future, from which we can never return to a world of nationalistic villages such as existed before 2000 arrived, before the beginning of the ever-growing, one-and-only global monolith that the computer and instantaneous communication in the age of Bill Gates’s “Business @ The Speed of Thought” has wrought, all the world pouring second by second, minute by minute through the electronic spigot of the world wide web.

And so, as aware as any generation perhaps has ever been that newly emerging realities of the global marketplace are not necessarily going to whistle their tune, who are these new students of ours, children of Gen Y adults and Millenials’ younger siblings, these Generation Z students, born after 1996 and coming of age ten years into the new century?

This is what this workshop set out to encounter, at least, if not to limn completely.  Our answer was, as usual, to look at such generalizations about future trends as were available on the internet, then consider new tools with which to face the new challenges posed by our “new students of the digital age”.  Thus, after a general introduction (see PowerPoint below), I opened the floor to the five presenters listed above, who carried us from 6:20 to 7:45 pm.  As you can see in this blog, several of the presenters listed above have already posted their presentations. Thanks to all for taking part in a well-attended (34 participants) workshop featuring Diane’s masterful organizational help as well— and, New Haven pizza, naturally enough, Modern on State St. being halfway between Hamden Hall and the New Haven Green.  - wordforester (Bill Hunter, Hamden Hall School)

– Introductory PowerPoint:   millgenzpresentapr17hunter3

Tech Tools for 21st Century Learners

On April 17th, the Commission on Professional Development hosted a workshop “The New Frontier: Meeting the Challenge of Millennial and Generation Z Students” at Hamden Hall Country Day School.  Sarah Ludwig, Academic Technology Coordinator/ Librarian and I did a short presentation entitled “Tech Tools for 21st Century Learners”. It was meant to provide a brief look at a few of the tools that 21st century students might find useful.

Millennials Presentation

View more PowerPoint from Lorri Carroll- HHCDS

Getting on the technology bus

I am ever astounded at the fast pace of the changes in the world of technology.  The role of technology in education is moving out of the computer lab in the classroom, leading to a greater importance to prepare all educators for technology integration. 

“New technology is a lightning rod and polarizing force because it not only begins to influence what we see and how we see it, but, over time, who we are.” (Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.)

In a recent discussion concerning further technology adoption in my school, the point was made that we must consider some key points.

• What pedagogical practices are being impacted with the inclusion of technology and does it make sense to bring about that change?
• What do teachers feel comfortable with related to technology, and how do we provide them professional development to feel more comfortable?
• Do we adopt new technologies knowing that teachers are unfamiliar with their practices and uses? 
• How do technologies truly impact student learning and skill development?

“Teachers can enhance their lectures with presentation software, videos and other forms of multimedia, but the methods stay the same. For teachers who don’t understand how these new tools can enhance what they are teaching, then technology can be a distraction.” (Aran Levasseur, Teaching Without Technology? | MindShift)

As an example, I recently observed a teacher utilizing a Smartboard in our building.  We are moving to adopt more in the next school year and some teachers are eager to try it out now.  Many see it as a great tool and perfect for today’s learning, but as this eager teacher found out in is not the education panacea.

What happens when it doesn’t work perfectly? 
This teacher thought you hook it up and it works.  However, it was not so.  First was how to hook it up, then what if it didn’t project properly, and what if the board needs to be re-calibrated?  What do to if the software decides to quit or the downloaded lesson doesn’t work quite right?  These pitfalls can happen with any technology. 

How does the lesson on the board translate to good teacher?  
The lesson doesn’t replace good teaching.  The board is just the medium through which good teaching takes place, just as if with a worksheet, text book or other tool.  A good teacher should be able to teach with or without the board with the same effectiveness, and adapt the lesson with the ebbs and flows that technology can bring.

How does the Smartboard impact student learning? 
As one person in the meeting brought up when I mentioned the impact I had seen on student engagement in using the board since September, that it wasn’t the board itself, but the impact of my teaching and ability to engage students through the use of the board.  With any technology, thought should be given to its true impact on learning in the classroom.  

What does this all mean? 

This gave thought to the adoption of any technology, Smartboard, laptops, iPads, etc… Those that understand the technology need to guide teachers first, and provide the technology second.  While there a great thoughts for how important technology is to 21st Century learning, it is also important to consider at what pace these adoptions and changes are brought into the classroom.  

Technology can be great a method for alternate assessment and a means to complete a skill, but we need to instruct students how to do this, just as we instruct them to complete a math equation or formulate an essay.  Students cannot learn how to best utilize the tools if teachers are not on the bus with them.

“What’s important to remember is that your colleagues did not get there overnight. What’s also important to remember is that you can only glean so much about a lesson or project through a tweet, a blog post or a quick walk by a classroom door. I can remember thinking that a project I did was really “cool,” only to realize that it wasn’t necessarily as effective as I would have liked. From the outside, my lesson looked great — the kids were content creators, their work was shared with the world and they were using a digital tool of some kind — but my project objective or outcome was fuzzy, or the process to get there left much to be desired.
Most people who successfully integrate technology into their classrooms on a daily basis have not always had success. Their road to successful lessons has been plagued by tech failures, poor time management, misleading directions or an incomplete understanding of the tool or technology they were putting into their students’ hands.” (Mary Beth Hertz, @mbteach)

So as schools move forward to include more technologies into the classroom, make sure that right people, the teachers, are on the bus first, and then make sure the bus is headed in the right direction, impacting student achievement.  Don’t be afraid to adopt in waves, and to wait to see if the technology is truly having an impact before going to the next stop.