No Excuses For Not Using Classroom Tech Tools

Recently, I volunteered to help a parochial elementary school formulate a new strategic plan. The principal is very enthusiastic and optimistic about the school's future and very open to the transformative potential of incorporating new technology tools to improve student learning. She has bright students, a talented and dedicated teaching staff, involved parents a balanced (if somewhat inadequate) budget and stable (even slightly increasing) enrollment. By all accounts, this is a school that is primed to take a major step forward in 21st century education.

At the first strategic planning committee meeting, I did a presentation about the changing nature of education and the challenges these students will face in the knowledge economy they will encounter after school. I talked about using technology tools to teach essential 21st century skills. I explained how they could incorporate virtual classes, individualized online programs to help struggling readers and mathematicians, classroom blogs and websites, 1:1 computer programs and using technology to expand student learning beyond the school walls. The parents and teachers on the committee seemed excited.

Photo courtesy of www.st-alphonsus.org/school 

After several more committee meetings, we were ready to craft the plan. Imagine my disappointment when the parents and teachers' initial enthusiasm for educational technology had turned to skepticism and a prevailing attitude of "it'll never work." In the end, they proposed a "strategic" plan that was really nothing more than "let's just keep doing what we've always done."

Now I didn't specifically talk about classroom wikis, but I can see how teachers, schools and districts might be tempted to shun the use of such technology tools in favor of the safe, familiar approach. I can imagine teachers in my school (a virtual school of all places) saying something like, "Sure it sounds like a wonderful opportunity to teach students in a new and exciting way, and it might work in some schools, but it will never fly in our school. It's impossible." I implore teachers, school officials and parents to give technology tools like wikis and blogs a chance to radically improve education and prepare students for a future in which such skills will be not only important but indispensable. Will there be challenges to meet and obstacles to overcome? Of course. But nothing worth doing ever comes without having the courage to take a chance. To those who say it's impossible, I would remind them that people said the same thing about winning WWII, climbing Mt. Everest, ending apartheid, landing a man on the moon and building a vast network of interconnected computers so everyone has equal access to the whole of the world's knowledge.

Using Web 2.0 Tools in a Web 1.0 School

"What did we do this week that you can apply in your school or job and how might you use it?"
That is really a two-part question and requires a two-part answer. The answer to the first part may sound patronizing, but everything we did this week could apply to my job/school. The answer to the second part, how might you use it, is the real challenge.
Contrary to what you might expect, most of the online K-12 curriculum currently available to schools and districts is what I would call Web 1.0. Sure, it is online as opposed to in a book or delivered in a classroom by a teacher, and most of it is designed to be accessed in an asynchronous manner by individual students working remotely at their own pace. But that doesn't make it collaborative, or what one of the authors we read this week referred to as social constructionist. It is primarily "read-only" and the assessment and feedback is primarily between the teacher and the student. So even though my virtual school is conducted entirely over the Internet, the method of instruction has yet to incorporate the full potential of the Internet in terms of moving beyond the traditional model of acquiring factual knowledge from teachers and textbooks and regurgitating it on standardized tests, or even the more sophisticated attempts at meaning-making, critical thinking and metacognition.
If we really aspire to become a school that harnesses the full power of the Internet as a "read/write" collaborative classroom without boundaries, we must find ways to incorporate all the Web 2.0 tools we touched on this week, from edublogs and wikis to podcasts, mobile devices and game-based learning. We must open our virtual doors and let the world in by publishing to the web and welcoming interactive comments and peer review. Virtual school cannot just be a place where students go to escape the "drama" of brick and mortar school life. It has to be the medium that leads the way in opening up young minds (and not so young minds for that matter) to a new way of thinking about learning... where the distinction between being "in school" and being "out of school" is blurred. In other words, a world where life is school and learning occurs constantly.
It's not as big a leap as we might think. Every kid that updates their status on Facebook is, in essence, blogging. And every kid who comments on the silly picture their friend posted is participation in social constructionism whether they realize it or not. It's up to us as educators to first understand the learning potential of these technologies ourselves, and then help students safely and responsibly harness the power of technologies they are already using and familiar with to expand their knowledge and understanding of the world.