Lightning in a Bottle

I’ve been thinking a lot about (still!) about the presentation I did in November, and a panel discussion we had here at the ESD in December. The latter was on the role of principals in implementing ed tech initiatives in schools. Two district representatives shared about great programs going on in their schools in building up principals as ed tech leaders. A third panelist, however, reported a more real-life scenario. He himself is a principal, and though he has worked with technology himself for years and has been the technology planner for his district, ed tech isn?t on his to-do list. This isn?t because he isn?t deeply interested in it himself (which he most certainly is), but because it simply isn?t in his accountability set ? he gets pushed and pulled in many directions, but nobody is pushing him on technology.

I think he felt like a heretic in church, but I really appreciated what he had to say. I have listened for years to enthusiastic presenters tell us why technology will change education. Heck, I?ve been one of those presenters. Lately, however, I?ve been looking at this from the other direction. I have no doubt that we need to radically change education, and technology is both a driver and facilitator of that process. I would say that a large percentage of the people in the education profession would agree. So it doesn?t seem to be a question necessarily of convincing people; what is holding things back?

As I?ve been pondering this, I came across a self-improvement writer named Tim Gallwey, who has written books called the Inner Game series. I have found the latest book to be very insightful and useful, and I highly recommend it. I also found that he uses a simple formula for discussing his approach that I connected with right away:

Here P is for Performance, p is for potential, and i is for interference. Performance equals potential minus interference.

Now we?re talking! When we look at whether or not educational technology is impacting the performance of the student or teacher, we have to look not only at the potential of the technology, but what problems interfere with its use. All the potential in the world is wasted if you don?t understand and deal with the interference.

Most importantly, we have to recognize that most of the issues that cause interference are outside the control of the individual classroom teacher. I don’t want to see any more presentations that imply we need to change the teachers? attitudes and beliefs, since I find that often that isn?t the issue at all. To the contrary, I meet many highly motivated teachers that don’t need more enthusiasm; they need help removing barriers. They want to try new things, but there aren?t enough computers, or equipment, or preparation/training time, or clear guidance on how to integrate into their instruction. Even more importantly, for many teachers the P for Performance their principal or district is measuring doesn?t include technology, but instead is focused soley on content performance by their students. Unless we can demonstrate that technology is helping with that kind of performance, technology instead will be perceived as an interference in itself, detracting from the potential of the teacher and students. Sadly, I’m sure many already do perceive it that way!

The panel discussion I mentioned in the previous post was recorded, and can now be listened to online at Clarity Innovations podcast Ed Tech Coast-to-Coast. While you can’t see the slides that David, Tim and I are using, I think you can still get a clear understanding of what we are sharing.

Technology and Learning hosted their first Seattle-area Tech Forum in Bellevue last week. It was well attended, with around 200 participants. It was a nice size for a technology conference. I had the pleasure of participating in a panel with super tech principal Tim Lauer from Lewis Elementary School in Portland, and the peripatetic David Warlick, educational technology consultant superstar. Actually, it’s kind of hard to compete with two people such as these, but it was fun nonetheless. The topic was Technologies that are changing education, and I let Tim and David take the really exciting stuff, like blogs, wikis, Google Maps and all. I love these technologies and what they are doing in the classrooms where they are being used, but I decided to take a different tack. The fact is, if you do a survey of classrooms throughout our region, you’ll find that very, very few are using any of the technologies described by David and Tim. Far more are using technologies that aren’t as exciting, but are having still having a huge impact, such as document cameras and projectors.

Why is that? This is the slide I used to illustrate the point.

Technologies such as document cameras take off quickly because teachers can see an relatively immediate impact for relatively little investment of their time and effort. That’s the green line. Technologies such as blogging (or video making, or hypermedia, or Lego Robotics, or many other really exciting technologies) tend to follow the red line. There is a lot of effort involved in learning and managing the new technology, and many teachers will give up before they see the return on that effort, or may not even perceive what the return it. (Note that the labels are Perceived Effort and Perceived Return. For tech-loving teachers, hours spent after school learning a new technology aren’t really perceived as an effort - they love doing it.)

That doesn’t mean “red line” technologies will never be adopted, but it does mean that districts need to recognize the realities of getting them into classrooms. We have surveyed the teachers of a dozen districts in the last few years, and the single consistent issue that comes up is time. Teachers already have too little time to get their jobs done, and learning new technologies (and the teaching strategies that make them worthwhile) takes even more time that they don’t have. There has to be systemic support for teachers to undertake the level of change that can produce something like blogging throughout a district. Unless we recognize the amount of effort necessary to make this kind of change, schools will continue to be a hodgepodge of participating and non-participating classrooms.

This has to be driven by a clear vision at the building and district level. The vision gives the teachers the understanding of the value of the effort, and the security in knowing they will get the support they need to implement it. The vision and support carry them through slow beginning at the start of the red line. Tim’s school demonstrates that with a supportive leader providing that clear vision, it is indeed possible for an entire building to make amazing things happen. With more leaders like him, perhaps we can get to the point where document cameras really aren’t the most widely-used new technology in classrooms.

The American School Board Journal cover story for October is about differences in brain function and learning between genders. What is fascinating about the article is that it shows the direct lines connecting what we now know about gender, brain function, behavior, learning style, and instructional strategies. Researchers are now able to directly image how the brains of girls and boys operate differently while engaged in the same tasks, whether they are math, language arts, or other efforts. More importantly, researchers such as the author of the article have documented how to change teaching practice to apply this knowledge, with significant impact on student success.

While this is not about technology per se, it certainly has great implications for educational technology. If boys write better by creating a visual storyboard rather than an outline, what tools could we use to improve that process? (Suddenly digital photography takes on new instructional possibilities.) If girls do better in math when instructional materials emphasise verbal elements, would that influence your choices of technology-delivered supplementary math materials (such as Fizz and Martina, Math Mysteries, or PrimeTime Math from Tom Snyder Productions)?

Of course, this all appeals to me because I’m a science and research nerd. I love to see how our increasing knowledge and understanding of how the brain works can help us see the process of learning through new eyes. We no longer need to argue about or guess why girls and boys learn differently; we now know how and why. Now we can concentrate on how to apply this knowledge to help kids learn the best ways possible, and hopefully apply technology to enhance these new approaches.

And yet another interesting technology option popped up in web articles today. HP has announced the development of the “memory spot”, a tiny wireless memory chip that can be place on virtually anything. Only around one or two millimeters on a side, the chip is embedded on a small adhesive circle about the size of a paper punch. The prototype holds 512k, but in production they expect to increase that by at least three or four times. In quantities, they hope to get the cost down to around a dollar.

This is not simply a memory chip - it also has a processor. It’s really a tiny little computer. To put this in perspective, when I started in computers in 1982, an Apple ][e computer cost around $2,000. It had only 48k of memory! Adjusting for inflation, that Apple would cost $4,000 today. This tiny computer that HP has developed will cost 1/4000 of that, yet have more than ten times the memory storage.

And, as I said, it is wireless. What can you do with it? Imagine sending a picture of the beloved granddaughter playing soccer to Grandma and Grandpa, and in the corner is a small circle. They place their wireless reader over the dot, and in moments they hear the voice of their grandchild describing kicking her first goal. Or dots in textbooks that download video files to a handheld computer, or data files for experiments into a graphing calculator. A student-created guidebook of the local beach has audio files describing the sea life you can find at low tide.

That’s what we are imagining today. In fact, the question What can we do with it? will be answered again and again with innovative ideas we can’t even yet imagine. It’s our kids that will get to do that - and it would sure be cool if they were offered the chance develop those new ideas in school.

I just read an article about a new line of multimedia-equipped GPS units. Targeted at museums and historical sites, these weatherproofed devices have color screens and can store up to 4 gigabytes of audio and video files, and as you walk around they monitor your location and can display information about the the significant items nearby.

As a history buff, this sounds pretty cool. But what really intrigued me was the idea of putting the devices in kids’ hands. Not to learn from them (which would, of course, be pretty interesting), but to have the students actually create the content that plays back. I can’t imagine there’s enough of a market for the Historical Walking Tour of Burien to generate much investment, but a team of students could put something together that would be a very popular item at the local library and historical society. And of course, there could also be nature walks in the local parks, and many other ideas that creative students and teachers could develop.

I wonder if they send out evaluation units…

Infoworld has a great article on using browser-based productivy applications. (In other words, replacements for programs like Word or Excel that are run off the web and through Internet Explorer, Firefox, or whatever web browser you happen to use.) Many are free, and can do most of what the programs you currently use can do.

In addition to the advantage of not needing to install the software on your computer, many of the web-based applications have collaboration features, so that multiple people can share and edit the same documents.

The article found that there are many options available, and gives a pretty good overview of the ups and downs of working this way. The end opinion seems to be that there are a lot of possibilities in this approach, but it’s not quite ready for prime time yet. Knowing how much pressure already exists on the bandwidth in many school districts, I would think this is still and “out there” solution for a lot of schools, but it’s not that long until virtually everyone will have the network access to make this work.

Boy, that’s a lot of empty space!

Summer is not a quiet time when your job is focused on teacher training. This summer I taught or co-taught three Photoshop classes, one class on weblogs and podcasts, a week-long multimedia projects class, a four-day digital storytelling class, and three Digital Photography Bootcamps. And somewhere in there I actually took some vacation, too.

Despite the hectic pace of it all, it was a great summer. It was really exciting to me to see what teachers can do when they are given the opportunity to really, deeply explore the use of digital tools such as PowerPoint, iMovie, Photostory 3. Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, weblogs, podcasting and digital cameras. It recharges my batteries to see teachers get excited about what they can do and create, and start thinking about how they can take these tools back into their schools.

My only worry is the question Can they? Can they take what they learn here back to the classroom? I’m not questioning the capabilities of the workshop participants; I’m worried about the flexibility in their schools to make room in the curriculum for the time and effort to use these tools and resources or to provide the technological support to use them. I’ve seen the deeply meaningful learning that many of my participants have experienced reflected in the multimedia projects they have created in our workshops. I really want to see students have that same opportunity.

Not many entries this summer! Of course, I could say that it’s because nobody is around to read them, but actually it’s because it’s our crazy season. Since June 25, I’ve either taught or helped teach one three-day camp, two one-day workshops, and a five-day workshop. Throw in a week of vacation and there isn’t much time for blogging. Over the next few weeks I have two more camps, four more one-day workshops and a four-day workshop. (You know, teachers may think it’s great to get the summer off, but it’s hard on the teacher trainers!)

The sad part is that it’s also a great learning time for me, and I should be carving out time to share what I’m discovering. For instance, in the week-long multimedia workshop I taught earlier this month, one of the participants was an education professor from a four-year college. He shared with us that when he attends national conferences representing faculty from colleges of education, the cultural norm is to keep Powerpoint slides fairly plain, emphasizing almost entirely text. He said that his colleagues will get after him for putting in “non-content” items such as images.

Wait. Images aren’t content? Sure, we’ve all seen lots of PowerPoint presentations filled with inane pictures that have nothing to do with the content being shared, but that doesn’t mean images should be completely dispensed with. It just means that those who create presentations need to be purposeful with the images they choose to use. The phrase a picture is worth a thousand words has been around long enough to underscore that yes, images are content, and can be remarkably efficient at that.

This would be funny except that the community of people in question are the people who are instructing our new teachers. Arrgh.

So, I’ll try to share more as the summer goes by. I’m learning a lot. Besides, I’m also teaching class on Weblogs, Wikis, and Podcasts on Wednesday, and I certainly need something posted for that!

As a science teacher and ed tech person, I’ve always been enthused about the use of technology in teaching science. More to the point, I’ve been excited about kids using technology to do science. After all, real scientists do!

Still, I haven’t seen as much activity in this area as I would like. Part of it is that science-oriented peripherals (Digital microscopes, probeware, etc.) are specialized and somewhat expensive. Part of it is also that integrating these tools is more complicated than, say, adding word processing to writing instruction or web-based research tools to a social studies class. Science data-collecting equipment and software is more complex, and managing a lab-based instructional environment is even more complex. (And I suppose a big part of it has been that science isn’t on the accountability chart. Yet. But it’s coming!)

That’s why I was pleased to read about the Sand Diego School District’s grant project. The press release hasn’t got a lot of detail, but what I see I like. In particular, there is a real emphasis on teacher training and the development of professional learning communities. That’s going to help regardless of whether or not technology is put to use. (It also sounds a lot like our No Limit math and technology grant. Great minds think alike!) I hope to track down more information as to the kind of technology and activities they have been using so far, and what they see using in the future. I’ll post what I find here. (via TechLearning.