Category: Classroom management

If you don’t have children, you may not have noticed the massive changes going on in how students learn. Where adults are struggling with adjusting to the onslaught of technology in their lives, hoping to slowly inch their way into its use, students have no such luxury. Every year, there are new iPads, apps, online grading systems, a teacher website they have to visit every day for homework. As a teacher for twenty five years (the last fifteen in technology), it has my head spinning.

But students don’t mind a wit. They’re ready, wondering what’s taking us so long to use the tools they can’t get enough of at home.

For every tool added, one that has been a mainstay of education for decades must disappear. Here are eight that you should wave goodbye to because within the next ten years, they’ll be gone:

Books

Do you remember when you used to have a textbook for every subject. When it was social studies time, you pulled the textbook out and followed along chapter-by-chapter, hoping to finish by the end of the year? Not anymore. Now, teachers use a variety of multimedia materials, rarely as mundane as a text with pictures. Now, history comes alive with primary source audio and video, simulations of events, and games that reinforce math and science.

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In 2010, ‘BYOD’ officially entered the national lexicon with this pronouncement in the National Education Technology Plan:

Only with 24/7 access to the Internet via devices and technology-based software and resources can we achieve the kind of engagement, student-centered learning, and assessment that can improve learning in the ways this plan proposes. In addition, these devices may be owned by the student or family, owned by the school, or some combination of the two.

BYOD–Bring Your Own Device–one of the cutting edge tools available to schools. Rather than investing in schoolwide iPads or laptops or Chromebooks, everyone brings their own digital device. Sure, the school must make available some devices for students who don’t own one, but that’s a fraction of the investment in funds, training, and technology normally required without a BYOD program. With students bringing their own favorite digital device, students get to use the device they’re already comfortable with, one that is easily transferred to home use (which encourages its use for homework and projects). Suddenly, lots of activities that weren’t possible before become a reality. Like:

• digital note-taking via Evernote
• sharing and collaborating via GAFE
• use of backchannel devices like Today’s Meet
• feedback via Twitter (for age-appropriate students) and/or blogs
• answer to questions that aren’t in the subject-provided material, something outside the scope of the curriculum but not the student curiosity

If you’re considering a BYOD program, here’s what you should think about:

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It’s 2014–an era of increased understanding, patience, creativity…

And technology.

Really? Wasn’t that last year’s educational buzzword? Why can’t that geeky stuff leave teachers alone? Education worked fine with blackboards and chalk and desks-all-lined-up-in-a-row. Now, students sit in circles, yell out questions, stare at iPads, do state reports on something called ‘Glogster.com’. Smartscreens, 1:1 computing and iPads have turned classes upside down. What else can change?

A lot, actually. Here are six trends you don’t want to miss. Embrace them and by next year, your students will be as excited to come to class as you are:

On Demand Teaching

Not only is the teacher leaving the front of the classroom, soon, they will be appearing virtually on a screen in your home. Thanks to programs like Google Hangout, if it snows, if a student is sick or out of town or on a field trip, everyone can still participate in class. All that’s required is a Google account (like students get with Google Apps for Education) and an internet connection (at the student home, a friend’s house, or even the library). This works nicely too if the teacher is away from the classroom for faculty training. They simply tape the class, collect required resources, and students log on during class time.

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Today I have a guest post from Sam Melton. Sam is in his final year at Winthrop University studying Middle Level Education and will graduate with his teaching credential in May, 2014. Please feel free to connect with Sam at sammeltontalks at yahoo.com.

I asked Sam to share with us what he sees as the future tech tools for tomorrow’s classroom. Here are his thoughts:

I’m wrapping up my time in school and soon, I’ll be a certified teacher in my own classroom. Throughout my education, there’s been one integral aspect of my success: technology. I’m always online researching, using apps to stay organized, keeping my thoughts in check with a blog and using a tablet to get online from anywhere.

Those apps, devices and technical knowledge are something I’ll transition to use from being a student in a classroom to being a teacher in one.

Technology has been creeping into classrooms for years, and is now something teachers should be prepared to use – and be prepared for their students to use, too. There are certain technology apps and tools that future teachers like myself should become familiar with before they are in the classroom.

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It’s easy to confuse ‘using technology’ with digital tools. Your school bought iPads and passed them out to all classes. Some of your colleagues think having students read in this tablet format means they’re integrating technology into their curriculum. Kudos for a good start, but next, they need to use the tablets to differentiate for student learning styles, enrich learning materials, and turn students into life-long learners.

That’s harder than it sounds. Technology hasn’t been around long enough to beget standards that work for everyone (not withstanding ISTE’s herculean efforts), the set-in-stone of settled science. Truth, that will never happen. Technology tools populate like an out-of-control rabbit. Or bacteria in a culture. Every time you turn around, there’s another favorite tools some teacher swears has turned her students into geniuses and her class into a model of efficiency. After fifteen years of teaching technology, chatting with colleagues, and experimenting, I can assure you there is no magic wand like that. What there is is a teacher not afraid to try new ways, test them out in a classroom environment, toss what doesn’t work and share the rest. Her/his success doesn’t come without lots of failure and mistakes, widgets that sounded good but were too complicated or non-intuitive for a 21st century classroom.

Which of these nine mistakes do you make? Then, see how to fix them:

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Dear Otto is an occasional column where I answer questions I get from readers about teaching tech. I am always educated by the questions readers have. I find them fascinating, and wanted to share the most popular ones with you from 2013:

1. Dear Otto: What are Common Core keyboarding standards?
2. Dear Otto: How do I teach keyboarding in a 25-minute class?
3. Dear Otto: What do I do with students who ‘get’ tech really fast?
4. Dear Otto: Use Tech to Differentiate Lessons?

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I include lots of links for my readers to places that will help them integrate technology into education. They cover websites on lesson plans, math, keyboarding, classroom management, cloud computer, digital books, teacher resources, free tech resources, and more. On any given day, I generate on average 830 of these ‘click throughs’. Which links my readers select tells me a lot about the type of information they’re looking for.

Here’s a list of the top ten sites visitors selected from my blog:

1. itunes.apple.com–last year the top click-through was a website. This year, teachers are looking for apps for iPads.
2. libraryspot.com–there’s a big uptick in using the internet for research this year over last year
3. Structuredlearning.net–lots of teachers are finding books/ebooks here for integrating tech into the classroom
4. abcya.com–a popular site with classroom edutainment
5. factmonster.com–more research for class projects
6. kids.nationalgeographic.com–still more research. I’m seeing a trend
7. bigbrownbear.co.uk/keyboard/–One of my favorite sites to teach K/1 how to type
8. brainpop.com–great collection of videos and games on almost every topic
9. teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Kali-Delamagente-The-Tech-Teacher–my Teacher Pay Teachers store. Come Visit!
10. eepurl.com/gakDr--this is the sign up link for one of my newsletters.

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Kids love tablets (spelled I-P-A-D). It doesn’t matter that they won’t run most software, don’t have USB ports, have no flash, allow very little storage, and can’t print (with ease) because kids aren’t using them for that. In fact, according to a report from the UK’s MailOnline, most kids use tablets to play games, watch videos, and access the internet.

Which is different from how students (as a subset of ‘kids’) use tablets. When querying children about the education use of tablets, here’s what Nielsen found:

[from Nielsen’s quarterly “Connected Devices Report” and similar to the Ofcom Children and Parents: Media Usage and Attitudes Report though the MUAR finds 97% of children use tablets for school.]

As a tech teacher, I was surprised at the high email ranking. Conventional wisdom says kids don’t email, preferring texting, yet here, it’s the #2 most popular use. At the very least, I would have put it behind ‘reading books’, an activity probably at the cusp of why kids received the tablet: Parents want to encourage reading.

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Dear Otto is an occasional column where I answer questions I get from readers about teaching tech. If you have a question, please complete the form below and I’ll answer it here. For your privacy, I use only first names.

Here’s a great question I got from Linda:

We all have that student who just doesn’t get what we’re saying. We want to blame him/her–may even start that direction–but then, many of us, we pause to listen. What’s s/he saying–something about not understanding the problem? What’s s/he mean? What if we [fill in the blank with something outside the box]?

Here’s a 12-year old who happily and successfully sees the world as no one else does. And the world is a better place because he does. His message:

Stop learning and start thinking.

Solve problems your own way.

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