Tag: edtech

I Need to Write More about the NETP (30/365)

I’m in D.C. for a couple of days at the CoSN conference. Part of being here has also meant having conversations about the National Education Technology Plan. Talking about the NETP usually includes an awkward deflection or understatement of how much I was involved in its drafting and writing. It comes from not wanting to take away from the work or the fact that the document was a serious team effort. Here’s the thing, for more than a year of my life, the NETP was my life. I’ve read nothing else in the world more times than I’ve read the NETP in its various drafts, versions, and revisions.

I crossed the country a couple times and put many miles on many rental cars to get ideas, feedback, and the state of the art around how we might craft a national vision for how learning can be supported by technology.

It’s a good document.

We got input from learning scientists, classroom teachers, librarians, technologists, and even one of the inventors of the internet to write it. It’s a piece of government policy written for and by educators. Still, I’ve rarely talked about it. In fact, other than its mention in my CV, this is the first time I’ve written of the NETP on the blog. Part of that has to do with conflict of interest concerns while I was working at the Department, but that was nearly two years ago.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing more about the NETP, its content, and where we might look for and see the vision of the document in practice. For now, though, take a few minutes and read it.

My Least Favorite EdTech Story of the Week (11/365)

I’ve been mulling over the story above since I heard it Thursday. The gist is different classrooms or schools are buying pouches and requiring students to put their phones in these pouches, which can’t be unlocked until the end of class or the school day. NPR’s Tovia Smith reports on the trend, and it’s not difficult to understand why it got picked up.

The story plays on educators’ worst fears – laziness, lack of student attention, fighting against social media, “addiction” to tech. They’re tropes, and the pouches are a novel iteration of signs like the ones below.$15 fine for cell phone use during class

The story also misses an opportunity of the sort outlets like NPR pride themselves on – having the better conversation. In improvisational theater, it’s called moving from A to C. At some point in her reporting, Smith says:

DeCopain says students are more engaged, and some are starting to see the virtue in the pouches – sort of.

The “virtue of the pouches”? Aside from what I hope will be the title of an animated film about world-saving kangaroos, this is where the story misses an opportunity. In these 5 minutes, there’s no mention of the virtue of helping students self-regulate, there’s no mention of the virtue of teachers leveraging the fact students are bringing their own computers to class, and there’s no mention of the virtue of teachers considering how these devices make questions like the featured practice problem “X to the third power minus 13-X” exceedingly irrelevant (if they ever were).

The only counterpoint the story is Cal State’s Larry Rosen warning restrictions like the pouches could inspire “massive anxiety”, because children are fragile. Rosen’s suggestion of “tech breaks” further paints the picture that smartphones only serve as a distraction and have no practical use in the classroom, an argument we should be done making at this point.

My entire experience listening to the story, all I could think was, “This is completely letting teachers off the hook from improving their practice as professionals in modern schools,” and “We’ve found another way to make schools like prisons.”

I’m not so ignorant as to expect edtech stories (pouch stories) like this won’t get picked up by even the most reputable of news organizations. I’m not yet willing to let go of an expectation of full, thoughtful, balanced reporting when a story has many perspectives.

Kangaroo standing in a clearing
Photo by Mark Galer on Unsplash

 

#CharlestonShooting: Maybe it’s Time for You to Stop Talking

The victims

The nine people fatally shot at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church:

Clementa Pinckney, 41, the primary pastor who also served as a state senator.

Cynthia Hurd, 54, St. Andrews regional branch manager for the Charleston County Public Library system.

Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45, a church pastor, speech therapist and coach of the girls’ track and field team at Goose Creek High School.

Tywanza Sanders, 26, who had a degree in business administration from Allen University, where Pinckney also attended.

Ethel Lance, 70, a retired Gailliard Center employee who has worked recently as a church janitor.

Susie Jackson, 87, Lance’s cousin who was a longtime church member.

DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49, a retired director of the local Community Development Block Grant Program who joined the church in March as a pastor.

Myra Thompson, 59, a pastor at the church.

Daniel Simmons Sr., 74, a pastor, who died in a hospital operating room.

Remember when those who symbolically shut down the Internet when they threatened to filter what we could pirate online did nothing when someone else threatened who could feel safe in a church?
That was today.
Today I saw a social media feed that included my friends, former students, and colleagues of color posting under #CharlestonShooting about institutional racism. They were using social media to elevate and amplify attention to the problem. They were filling virtual spaces with physical anger, outrage, pain, and need for justice at what had happened in the real world.
By and large, my white friends and colleagues were not.
They were tweeting about pro-tips. They were posting about #ISTE15. They were writing about #edtech. They were enjoying the unbearable being of whiteness.
I was too to some extent. As much as a empathize with my black and brown friends in these too-frequent moments of horror, I cannot sympathize.
I am statistically safer when a police car passes me as I walk in my neighborhood at night. My educational attainment was all but locked up when I was born. And now, I will enter churches with less fear.
These things hurt my heart. I thought the terrorism was why I was feeling angry as the unaware posts scrolled by today. It’s part of it, but it isn’t all of it.
I am angry because I have heard, read, and seen many of these people talk about how #edtech, #connectivity, #techquity can do things like “level the playing field” in education. This is one of those opportunities they’re talking about, and they aren’t doing a damned thing in these public spaces that have afforded them some levels of success, power, or prestige.
Chris, who wrote here, theorized that the people I’m feeling disappointed in don’t know how to speak about these events in public.
This makes sense. Rarely will I engage in arguments and disagreements on social spaces. Public spaces don’t feel like spaces where I am safe to be vulnerable about issues that matter deeply to me personally. Those are conversations I need to have 1:1 with as many words or characters as it takes.
When it comes to truths, though, when it is about institutionalized racism, privilege, power, and class; those are statements of fact which I have no difficulty sharing.
And that’s what I’d like to see happening with my white friends who have been silent today because they are not in a place where putting their name to these truths feels safe. I’d like to see them finding the words of those who don’t have access to the same networks of friends and followers. Then, I’d like to see them sharing, liking, retweeting, reposting, re-whatevering those voices that are easily and dangerously unheard.
I’d like to see them decide to use the #edtech hashtag tomorrow for posting messages of actual equality and justice made possible by the same devices and connectivity they have touted as game changers and field levelers in keynotes and workshops.
They can start by looking at this twitter list of people of color in edtech compiled by Rafranz Davis and this list of my fellow members of educolor from Christina Torres and then follow all of them without reservation to bring some sense of equity to their rolls.
And in the long term, when they talk about technology and equity, they can ask educators to make their first posts about something of substance toward justice like the Voting Rights Act or how nine people were murdered as they sat in a place of peace and prayed.
Technology can be a game changer. It can level playing fields. It will not do it left to its own devices, and it will almost certainly contribute to shoring up online divides that mimic those of the physical world and allow for hate to hide.
If you are talking about #techquity and not willing to do anything for true #equity, there’s very little you have to say I care to hear.

What you believe – do (through choice, delightfulness, and email signatures)

A dry erase board sits atop a cabinet in our office. I reads, “This office believes in: choices, delightfulness, and email signatures.”

It’s been up there since I and two other team members started in the office and we sat down for a few days as a whole team to discuss what and whom we wanted to be as a group.

It’s in my poor chicken scratch penmanship, but this board has had a beautiful effect on my thinking as I’ve been moving through the district and doing the work from day to day.

When you know the ideals about which you care, you tend to orient your actions toward those ideals.

Why these three?

Choice?

We don’t know the best way to do anything. We know several good ways to do most everything. More importantly, as guests in schools and classrooms around the district, we have only snapshots of the day-to-day, moment-to-moment work being done by the adults and children we serve.

So, we provide choices based on what we see and what we want to do and then present them to people with the offer of conversation to help them curate their choices toward desired ends.

Some might think of choice and imagine a tabla rasa of options, which allow teachers any myriad courses of action without consideration of official district goals and efforts.

It’s not that broad. Instead, we look at what is to be done, what we say we want to do, and the data we gather through conversations and visits. From there, we design choices that align with existing efforts while pushing thinking forward and opening up possibilities of what can be created and produced as artifacts of learning and teaching.

The choices we work to provide live in the realm of the district’s established identity. When we started building the Professional Learning Modules for our Learning Technology Plan, we made certain that each module clearly connected with RtI Tier I Interventions as well as the Colorado Teaching and Learning Cycle. With the implementation of a new state teacher evaluation system, we added language to explain how completion of modules would help teachers improve their proficiency regarding Colorado Teacher Quality Standards.

Choice with a mission.

Delightfulness?

You could just as easily call this the Mary Poppins Principle. Whatever else we do, our team asks teachers to learn new things. For many teachers, this can feel like a daunting task when taken as anotehr component of the demands on their time.

Delightfulness, and a mind toward including it in all we do means finding the spoonful of sugar and trying our hardest to make the job as close to a game as possible.

This is all based on the presupposition that people enter into education because somewhere in the acts of learning and teaching they found joy. We believe that joy should live on well past their initial entrance.

If ever you were to come to our office for a meeting, you’d find baskets of LEGOs on the conference table, multiple dry erase surfaces (boards and tables) for doodling on, light sabres, and the odd viewing of a funny youtube video. We want to experience delightfulness so we can remember why it is important to provide it to those we serve.

Email signatures?

We serve. It might look like troubleshooting. It might look like lesson planning. It might look like coaching. It might look like eternal meetings. When you get right down to it, we serve the adults and children in our care.

When people email us, then, from any of the dozens of schools in our district, it is difficult to serve effectively when we are without the most basic context of who sent the email and from where.

An email signature with a teacher’s site, subject, grade level, and any other information can help us to understand a bit about whom of the thousands of teachers we’re working with.

It’s become boilerplate language in classes and presentations. For me, it often sounds like this:

I want to help you however I can and as best as I can. So, we’re going to take 3 minutes now to open our email and make sure you are telling a clearer story of who you are when you send an email. After I leave, your job is to make sure three other people who aren’t in this room right now have email signatures.

It’s a slow battle, but it’s worth fighting. I can’t help thinking it’s also made a difference when those teachers have sent emails to people in other offices in the district. Now, perhaps they have clearer pictures of whom they’re serving.

They are three simple things. They could easily have been any three other things. Somehow though, knowing we are about choice, delightfulness, and email signatures gives the office a sense of commonality and helps me to ask if what I’m doing aligns with what we have espoused as our beliefs.

Bringing the Phone Tree out of the Moth Balls

Never having played sports in school (or ever, really), the phone tree, as I understood it being used by soccer moms, never really entered into my life. I got the concept, but never needed.

When talking to a music teacher a few weeks ago about how he was using technology to care for students, the phone tree became suddenly relevant.

After a marching band gig, the teacher had sent a mass text to all of his musicians thanking them for showing up and performing. A simple act this teacher hadn’t thought much about until I’d worked to underline the importance of the ethic of care in the classroom.

It was a simple act that, after the instruments had been packed away, reminded the students that what they did mattered to other people and that they were valued.

Nice.

It also got me thinking about a possiblity for phone trees in the classroom. Apps are great and I’m all for welcoming kids to bring tech into school spaces. Oftentimes, this transitions to a mandate or a platform requirement.

Enter, phone ring.

Here’s what I’m thinking:

  1. At a class’ opening, each student is linked to another. A to B, B to C, C to D, etc. until Z is linked back around to A in the end. (More of a phone ring, I’m realizing.)
  2. Working on anything – homework, projects, whatever – if C has a question she can’t quite figure out, she gets ahold of D via whatever means necessary. It can be text, IM, e-mail (gasp), phone call (double gasp). D and C work together find an answer.
  3. If they can’t, that’s cool. The ring continues. D says, “I think we need another brain,” and gets ahold of E. The ring continues.
  4. Knowing the system is in place, the teacher begins the next class asking if any questions or troubles made it around the ring since their last meeting. It’s a formative assessment gold mine.

Student are practicing social skills, it’s low-threat collaboration, it values the asking of questions. It’s low-cost and allows for the use of mobile technologies without requiring them or the installation of new functionalities.

P.S. In putting together the chain, I’d probably take personalities into consideration and try to build in as much student choice. The easiest way I’ve found is starting with a conversation of what it means to be connected to someone who supports your learning and then asking each student to write down the names of three students they know would support their learning if they were linked and one student who would probably derail their learning. After that, it’s up to teachers’ professional opinion to make matches that foster student growth.

Things I Know 137 of 365: Conversations are excellent professional development

Change that eminates from teachers lasts until they find a better way.

– Roland Barthes

Continuing to tie up the year during SLA’s weekly professional development meetings, it was my Professional Learning Community’s turn to present what we learned during our independent study in the first semester.

My very small learning community consisted of Mark, a math teacher, and me. That’s it. Just two of us.

I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t love learning with Mark in the first semester.

What began as a plan to find new tools and writings to bring to each meeting shifted into something more directly applicable – conversation.

Each time we met, Mark and I shared what we were doing in our classes and brainstormed ways in which technology could transform students’ learning into something more engaging, authentic and differentiated.

As Mark admitted, I’ve a bit more proficiency with tech and learning. Often, our conversations consisted of me learning about the math concepts he was teaching his students and then throwing out whatever ideas came to mind.

Because I realized math is Mark’s domain of understanding and had no qualms admitting my deficiencies in its instruction, I didn’t hold back my ideas, nor did I take offense when Mark dismissed an idea as impractical.

Had I paired up with another humanities teacher, my ideas might not have flowed so freely, and any negation might not have been so freely accepted.

When it came time to plan our presentation to the entire faculty, we experienced a moment of pseudo-panic. Had we been collecting and cataloging tools and articles throughout the semester as we planned, we would have been set. Read this, now try this, now plan a sample lesson, now share, now critique in small groups. It’s the unsweetened cereal of professional development.

When it came time for today’s presentation, we decided to share not only what we learned about the tools, but what we learned about process as well.

For us, learning had been social, collegial and immediate.

In the first five minutes, we gave an overview of our process.

Next, I asked each faculty member to think about where they would rate their comfort with technology in learning on a scale of 1-10.

“Now, use your fingers to show your number. Without talking, line up from highest to lowest.”

They did.

From their, we broke the line in half. The highest end of each half was paired with the highest end of the other half and they were broken into couples.

Then, down to business.

Laptops in tow, the lower numbers in each pair explained what they’re doing in their classrooms through the end of the year. The higher numbers listened, asked questions and then started brainstorming ideas on how tech could be better leveraged to help with learning.

Mark and I milled about the room.

At each table I stopped, a conversation similar to the conversations Mark and I had throughout the first semester was taking place.

After a few minutes, we paused, asked people to share what was going well and then gave a few more minute either to continue on their topics of discussion or to let those who had been brainstorming share what was going on in their classrooms.

For the finish, I asked the group what they noticed about the past 25 minutes that stood out to them:

  • People were working cross-disciplinarily. With one or two exceptions, each couple was made up of teachers from different disciplines.
  • People were talking one-on-one about their practice.
  • People were talking about things that could immediately affect classroom practice rather than living in the hypothetical.

We also talked about what could be done to continue this kind of conversation and collaboration. The thing that stuck the most was the idea of moving outside people’s normal routine to seek out the feedback of our peers.

That’s the key of it. In a structured, focused way, we asked people to move outside the routine of talking to those in their disciplines or the routine of curriculum design and have a one-on-one conversation about improving how they teach.

That should be the routine.

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