Karen Cator Direction, Office of Education Technology US Dept of Ed on Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Tech #mec2011

Cator was introduced by John Huppenthal, Arizona Superintendent of Public Schools. National Education Technology Plan introduced in fall through Drupal, and they said it was a “draft” because this is a working document that is alive. Not some proposal printed, stuck on a shelf and forgotten.

“Now is the Time!” Obama, Huppenthal, and Cator are speaking the language of tech in education. Teachers have been doing this for years, she said; it’s time to make hit work. Obama: “By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduate in the world”. Now the question actor asks is “how do we become a learning nation”. Obama said we need to “…out innovate, our educate, out build…” by learning from other nations and jumping ahead. 82% of schools are in improvement currently, and that can’t work.

CC image posted on Flickr by ALan Levine.

We need to reboot our education system … this is a “matter of national security”. One year ago there was no market for tablet computers. What we’ve seen this year is a proliferation of mobile computing that includes 24/7 access. 50-70 million tablets will be sold this year globally. Mobile productivity means we move beyond eight hours inside four classroom walls. Learning in the 21st century is about learning how to handle “Social Interactions for Learning”. There’s so much digital content out that that we can all learn from including PBS chunking their videos, universities adding free online free courses. Stop blocking student access to these things. We do need to learn how to “safe search” in schools, but don’t just arbitrarily block everything. We have paper classrooms and online classrooms but how do we blend the two? Print has become digital.

Digital books can take us deeper into concepts, teach us about the writers, take us to other books and ideas by others. Much more than just the print book of yesteryear. When disability act required ramps and sidewalks, it did not just help wheel-chaired people, but also strollers, bikes, etc… Digital print is like this as we move to a digital learning environment.

NETP has three parts. Teaching, Learning, and Assessment. This is the infrastructure, and now we need to move towards productivity. Next up is R&D. What is the importance of learning and what do we need? How do real world people think and learn? “We’re training for 2020 Olympics, but we don’t know the sport yet.” We need 21st century expertise. How do students learn to think globally? In what ways do students now approach learning? NETP is grounded in how people learn and the importance of affect, language, prior experience, etc… We need to personalize learning, and with tech this is absolutely possible. There should be a universal design for learning, and multiple avenues for learning are being created so students can access learning in various ways. Finally, in the learning space learning has to be connected as informal and formal; we can’t keep kids in schools for 12 hours. Learning moves beyond the classroom walls. Students have so many opportunities: robotics, music classes, sports, etc… So much of their learning is outside of schools.

Assessment is still key. How do we make sure student performance is measured? We need to measure what matters. Assessment 2.0 goes beyond the bubble test and gives us an understanding about growth. The opportunity to embed assessment inside games, scaffolded spaces, etc… gives measurement on the fly. Which sorts of assessments work for which kids, in which circumstances, etc… By examining this, we have real time feedback. Real time feedback is better than the refrigerator door model. Online student publishing is so important today, and no longer does it really matter when teachers hang student work on their classroom walls … it’s more important to have that work published online where it is more permanent than the end of the quarter when the classroom is cleaned.

Teachers need to be highly “effective” and highly connected. Teachers need to be connected to the experts, colleges of ed, and their peers. Engage teachers in new ways of thinking about learning and how we can use ubiquitous technology. Teachers should have a laser focus on the idea of time as an issue; we live in a print based environment, but as we moved to digital, students can move on to the next piece of learning instead of waiting for the teacher. Once we put the tools in the hands of the students, teachers will have more time to be more engaged with more of our students. Differentiated roles of teachers is important. Online scaffolded education is so important as we have so many experts but so little physical time, let’s move this all online. So much teaching is outside of the school walls. And what can we do to help teachers be more successful in helping students learn. We need to inspire both our colleagues and our students. Teaching never ends when the final bells role.

Cator said teachers need to have a persistent online profile, just like a Facebook profile. The profile should include what we’re interested in, what we ourselves want to learn, what we’ve published, etc… We can’t shy away from online profiles. When this is public student can seek us out to learn from us. When we hide this information away, we reach less students.

Cator said our goal is “All students and educators will have access to a comprehensive infrastructure for learning when and where they need it.” What the Department of Education wants for our education system is: 24/7 Community wide to technology (some school districts like Vail in Tucson give them hardware), Broadband in schools, Access Points for the Internet, and support for technology (having access to people who know how to troubleshoot the hardware and software), and we need equity in technology. Data.ed.gov is launching broadband availability for US Schools. NITA and the FCC is working on this right now with the department of education. This is the National Broadband Map, and Dept of Ed wants transparency on where broadband is so we can all work on building up access so ALL students have connectivity EVERYWHERE they need it WHENEVER they need it.

How do we make sure we’re building efficiency and effectiveness in student productivity? We have had decades of print education, and we need to have new ways of redesigning processes to better deal with helping learning be more productive. Cator’s talking about Kahn Academy about learning math online; videos online is cool but now practice sets have been added, so students can practice, find out if they’re right or wrong, and then students can measure their own learning. How can teachers use this for learning?

Research and development. What needs to be invented next for all of this to work? Nobody is being funded to take these ideas to market even when we have prototypes available. There’s a gap between R&D and getting tech into the hands of our students. This is being worked on now.

CC image posted on Flickr by Devon Christopher Adams
Slide with Department of Ed’s National Technology Educational Plan outlined. At Microcomputers in Education conference at Arizona State U.

How will the Department of Education help support schools, a teacher asked Cantor? Her response: NETP is a good start if you make that required for teachers, admins, district officials and school boards. There are a ton of examples that you can put into practice right now in schools.

To conclude, NETP is improving access, creating transparency (telling thew stories of what is working in tech ed now and the classrooms, focus on people (support our communities and support system), and we need to invest in rapid improvement in technology for our students and classrooms. This is where the department of education is now, and these are the discussions that need to be going on in our schools and districts RIGHT NOW.

At the high school, we wanted to find a way to have the students keep their resources from year to year so they can build their own resource aggregation. Discussions of Diigo emerged and we realized we could use Diigo to build their repository. Below is just one example of a set of annotations my students completed and if you look at the time stamp this single page from a Gmail archive is just a few hours worth of discussions and annotations online in various websites. Check out http://bit.ly/diigoit for my resources, and if you have anymore resources I should include there, let me know!

Crude & Awkward: Educational Forms & Teacher 2.0

In a recent panel I chaired at National Council of Teachers of English entitled LEARNING LITERATE LIVES: 21ST CENTURY LITERACY SKILLS BEYOND INDIVIDUAL TECHNOLOGIES with Shelley Rodrigo, Chad Sansing, and William Kist, the discussion revolved around grass roots educational reform in terms of trying to move beyond the catch phrase “21st century learning” towards what that REALLY means. In November 2008, during Marc Prensky’s keynote from NCTE in San Antonio, he discussed how the taxonomies must shift from the nouns of Bloom’s 1956 model towards a “verbed” model where CREATING is shifted to the top. This same concept, for me, applies to technology tools. Educators want to take these shiny tech tools and try to shove them into the tired, regurgitated pedagogical paradigms. But that’s not effective. We can’t just grab the most recent cool Web 2.0 app and use it in our classes for the sake of using it. It doesn’t work, no matter how hard we’ve tried.

I’ll admit it; I’ve done it. I’ve said “let’s do this project” and “here’s the tool!” The kids groan, and I groan later… the reason I groan is because suddenly this cool shiny tool does NOT work! We use to love utterli.com and used it for maybe a year in a half until, during one project, it just died. I contacted the Utterli people who ignored me. I checked their Twitter feed that looked dead. My kids complained. They emailed me and each other, over and over. Nothing I could. I moved away from Utterli (if you find anything that can replace Utterli, tell me). I then tried another awesome tool I loved one called Xtimeline.com. Guess what? It worked very well until I asked 100 students to use it during the same week! It died. Same deal. Next up, Capzles.com. Some things worked very well but then we found bugs. The “CEO” would answer emails and sounded great. This lasted a week. After that, he stopped responding to my (very respectful) questions/emails. This is what happens.

Teacher 2.0

So what do we do? We need to stop giving them these tools. Yes, I think I said that. Let’s start with the notion of US. Who are we? Who must we be? This blog is called Teacher 2.0 because we need a pedagogical reboot. Most of us are our own tech support, our own pedagogical experts, and our own content area authorities. By wearing all three hats, this becomes more difficult for us. Beyond teaching we, often, are required to teach to the test, chair committees, sponsor clubs, etc… And all of this beyond actually teaching.

cc image posted on Wikipedia by Punya Mishra on February 15, 2009

I call us Teacher 2.0. Not all of us, but the ones who “get it” and really try to become the center of the above diagram. Those of us in these discussions and care about our kids. It’s frustrating to be Teacher 2.0 because we have several challenges: 1) our IT department hates us because we’re the squeaky wheel who wants to get to websites that we hear work well but they filter them because they over filter and have unfounded fears of CIPA, 2) our class building colleagues who roll their eyes when we talk tech (like the teacher down the hall who wants to install a cell phone blocker in his classroom for his students!), or 3) our admin who don’t understand the technology updates because they’ve focused so long on either the pedagogical perspective or (god forbid) the management perspective of running a school. It’s hard to be a teacher in this world, and, too often, one of three things happens: 1) they give up and revert to Teacher 1.0, 2) they give up on teaching k-12 and shift to college/university (less filters, less big brother evals), or 3) they quit teaching all together. The last one is terrible because we lose some of our greatest teachers in our public schools every single day. Henry Giroux, critical and pedagogy theorist, in response to how teachers are currently being portrayed (read: lambasted) in the media and corporate American, argues that “Once eager public servants [teachers] in the fight for equality and justice, teachers are now forced to play with a severe handicap, as if assembled on a field blindfolded and gagged” (October 5, 2010). I have no idea why we placate the negativity thrust upon us. Is it through a mutual fear? We fear what education has become. The powers that be fear that eventually we teachers won’t continue our placated subservience towards the corporatized, politicized educational fruitcake system.

As I wrote that last bit I was about to make a caveat about not trying to sound conspiratorial and negative, but then I’d be sugar coating our current system. I won’t do that. What I will do is shift to a definition of today’s Student 2.0.

Student 2.0

A gap has emerged between the way teachers think and the way students think. The difference between the way we, the native immigrants work, and the way the digital natives learn are vast: they work at twitch speed (how fast their fingers move on cell phones or gaming joysticks), they randomly access information instead of linearily, they parallel process data, they read graphics first, and they are just truly more connected. People toss around terms for various generations. Don Tapscott calls current undergrads, high schoolers, and middle schoolers NetGen (TK) while Marc Prensky calls them digital natives (many people find this term problematic, and typically that focuses on class-based situations); I suggest the students a few years older than my own child in elementary and younger are now the iGeneration (or iGen, if you must). What makes these kids iGen is not knowledge or capabilities but it is attitude and comfort level. While GenX educators (and even those of us on the cutting edge of Teacher 2.0) tend to keep a foot in the past (like the people who print emails and edit research work by printing it and writing on the paper), don’t necessarily instinctively go to the internet first, don’t naturally share their public profiles, make assumptions that real life happens offline, and believe our pedagogical practices are effective, while our students are metaphoric rockets; they go at hide speed, they’re volatile, they’re headed places unknown, they need good programming and good payload, they may require mid course corrections, and they have an enormous potential payoff. Teacher 2.0 is scared, Teacher 1.0 ignores this shift, the administration sweeps this under the carpet, the test makers just want to make their money, and the politicians wants to filter education funds elsewhere.

Together we all need to realize student 2.0 are those who want to consume and create in the digital age.

cc image created and posted on Flickr by Devon Christopher Adams on November 17, 2010

Crude & Awkward

In closing, some technology tools last a few years while others last only a few months. Educators need to be aware that these tools disappear too quickly for us to really engage with them pedagogically. This scares teachers. Email has been considered for “old people” as far back as late 2007. What’s next to go? Our capabilities, mindsets, and activities need to change because technology evolves daily.

Teacher 1.0 and way too many of our IT departments and administrators make excuses that we don’t use the technology because:

We don’t have time.
It produces poor work.
Where’s the evidence it works?
We don’t have computers.
It doesn’t help students pass the test.
Kids will cheat.

Kids will cheat. Why do today’s teachers generalize this notion of using technology to cheat? This is profound because today’s students need to learn HOW to find knowledge and information rather than worrying about how they find that knowledge. Student 2.0 are not just using technology differently, they are reshaping their entire lives with technology. Students have online ways of communicating, sharing, buying/selling, exchanging, learning, meeting, gaming, coordinating, evaluations, collecting, creating, evolving, searching, analyzing, reporting, programming, etc…. Today’s student is a different beast than their predecessors: US, Generation X (for the most part) teachers. We, as teachers, formerly used our own personal, younger experiences to relate to our students, but this generation is different. We can’t do that now. What do we do? How do we reform education? We don’t need educational reform, we need new educational forms. And with these discussions, I hope we find them.

Here I’ll borrow William Kist’s silent film metaphor. The silent film format was cutting edge and brand new a century ago; no one knew what the next step was and no one knew where this all was headed. Those filmmakers were rudimentary, they were “crude and awkward”. Flash forward a hundred years and we have 3D television technology for our living rooms and watch film leap out at us from 15 story movie screens. Sure educational reform may take 100 years but I’m ready to start now. This is grass roots; Teacher 2.0 like you and me are the pioneers, and, I don’t know about you, but I am ok being called crude and awkward.