Tag: technology

The Conversations I Want to Have

All to All

As of June 15, my contract on my day gig will be up, and I’ll need to find some other way to keep my dog fed. As much as I’ve been thinking about geography when grappling with what this change means, I’ve been thinking about what kinds of conversations I want to be in and which ones I want to leave behind. With five and a half months left on the calendar, I’m gaining clarity.

The conversations I most want to sustain and move forward are those around equity and purpose. The first means all equities. I want to talk about the kid in middle school who realizes he’s gay and can’t access educational and social experiences like teachers’ use of heteronormative language and not feeling comfortable asking his crush to the school dance. I want to talk about the fact that if most school leaders say they invited their honors or gifted and talented-labeled students to participate in a program then I can be almost certain they didn’t invite students of color. I want to talk about how students in rural schools don’t have the access to arts, cultural institutions, and educational opportunities their urban- and suburban-dwelling peers have every day. As many flavors of equity as we can bring to the table, that’s what I want.

In all of my grad school experiences, I have asked and searched for an answer to the same question to no avail, “What is the pedagogy and practice that drives this institution of learning?” Silence each time. I ask a similar question of principals and superintendents, “What are the three things we are working toward this year?” Silence (usually uncomfortable), and then a garbled answer.

Thus, I want to improve conversations of purpose. For any action, program, or scheme; I want to help make sure there’s an answer to “Why are we doing this?” Similarly, for all askings of “What are we going to do?” I want to help organizations and people look to their agreed upon purpose for helpful guidance. If you don’t know your mission statement, then it’s probably not your mission.

The conversations I’m willing to step away from are simple. Anything that starts with, “How can technology…” Technology should not drive the question. It should be considered as an answer to a possible problem, and it becomes boring to be in room after room and seen as a person who is there to bring up technology before he brings up people and relationships. In the conversations I’m seeking, I hope to enter fewer rooms with that presumed persona in the same way a master carpenter probably doesn’t want to be “that lady who loves talking about saws.”

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

145/365 Early Adopters Don’t Wear Name Tags

Adoption Timeline Graph

I’ve had the graph above (or some iteration thereof) in my head for the last few weeks.

As our district preps for rolling out a massive infusion of technology into the hands of teachers and students over the next four years, I find myself wondering if each person I sit down with at a meeting is an innovator or a laggard or somewhere in between.

We are developing plans for helping first the teachers and then the students become used to having these new devices become the way of doing business. Part of my job in all of this has been developing the foundational course we’ll be asking all teachers to complete before they receive their first devices. It will include the rudimentary explanations of functionality – power, synching, applications, etc. It will include new guidelines outlining expectations and commitments for the teachers for and from our department and the amazing team that handles the wires and switches in the district.

Building the course, I’ve started to consider the early adopters, the early majority, and the other segments of the population, and I find myself wishing they would identify themselves not by their approaches to the machines, but to how they approach what these machines can do.

When planning the course, our team wanted to make clear that the basic operational instructions were optional so that those folks who knew where the power buttons were could move on to the new equipment.

Now that I’m building the thing, I am becoming aware of the differences in adoption. A teacher can be the earliest adopter of a device or technology. They can know the scripts, the codes, and the apps that make the thing do all the whiz-bang things it does.

This doesn’t mean, though, that they know how do adopt the device (whatever it may be) as a portal for shifting the practices of learning and teaching within our schools.

Those people are out there. Our district, and any other, has its own population of early thought adopters who see not only the devices but the possibilities. These people would likely see the possibilities without the devices, it’s just happy serendipity that both are arriving at the same time.

It’s likely these early adopters of practice find themselves in a distribution similar to the one pictured above. What I’m striving to remember is they will not wear name tags. Nor will they necessarily be the ones first in line to pick up their new tech. They find themselves stationed throughout the district.

What will make the difference, what is most important as we introduce this new technology across time and the district will be recognizing when the innovators and early adopters of ideas and practices also happen to be the innovators and early adopters of stuff. Those are the people to whom we will be able to turn to improve education for all children and adults in the district.

54/365 Remember Pencil Labs?

Where was your school’s pencil lab?

Think hard on the question. Where was the room set aside with rows upon rows of desks equipped with freshly sharpened #2s and a teacher whose express objective was to help you learn the proper implementation of pencil-based technology so that your math teacher, say, could attempt to integrate pencils into her lesson.

When did your English teacher announce that he’d reserved the school’s pencil lab so that you could go down and do some word processing using your school’s new install of graphite?

Point clear yet?

Computer labs should be as ridiculous sounding and backwards as the image of a pencil lab.

The pencil hit the market and, with the exception of a few lessons on handwriting, we never really looked back. This technology appeared inherently appropriate for classrooms. There was nothing natural about it from an ergonomical standpoint. Hand cramps, the hook or the slant of left-handedness – no, this was not a technology designed with the natural human body in mind. Still, we foisted it upon students because we saw potential in it.

Thinking of the dangers implicit in putting these technologies in the hands of students, it boggles the mind pencils and pencil 2.0 (pens) weren’t banned outright by school boards across the country. From the first moments, they were surely being put to all sorts of nefarious purposes. Social networking must have skyrocketed with the instant messages passed around class with their “yes,” “no” checkboxes and the read-write access allowing for user creation of “maybe.” How did teachers manage?

This is to say nothing of honest damage these tools caused allowing students to scribe hurtful, harmful, and hateful memes to and about one another that were passed around classrooms and schools with only serendipitous interception by a teacher as hope for protecting students.

That’s only when teachers were allowed to interact with students in pencil-based environments as outlined in what I’m sure were severe appropriate use policies keeping teachers (trained professional adults) from connecting with students and helping to model appropriate citizenship in a penciled environment.

I would have liked to be in on the professional development organized by schools and districts to help teachers get on board with pencils. Everyone groggily sitting in the cafeteria, sucking down industrial-strength coffee, mumbling to one another how the pendulum had swung once again to another edu-fad.

How many schools were kept from doing really interesting things by cadres of teachers who sidestepped their own learning by admitting freely that they were “pencil-illiterate” or “pencil-phobic?”

And when the pencils had worn down to the nubs by early adopters who saw these technologies for the freedoms they represented, who crowded the pencil labs before and after school so that they might push these pencils to their furthest limits, what happened then? Surely, we fretted about having to spend money on pencil upgrades – again. I wonder how we answered the administrator who questioned why students and teachers couldn’t just make do with the pencils we’d bought a few years ago.

That’s how it happened, right?