Category: Education reform

Ecolleague Mike Daugherty has over seventeen years experience in educational technology serving a variety of roles.  He was recently awarded the OETC (Ohio Educational Technology Conference) Technology Innovator of the Year award and received honorable mention in the national DILA awards. In his current position, he is the director of technology for a high-achieving public school district in Ohio.  His site, morethanatech.com, looks at EdTech from the district administration point of view.

He is also lucky enough to have a 3D printer. I asked him if he’d share his experiences with you. Here are his thoughts:

Similar to many school districts around the country, we decided to dip our feet into the 3D printing waters this past school year. 3D printing, Maker Spaces, and Fab Labs are the latest darlings of the EdTech world and for good reasons. The potential of these devices is almost limitless. There are a number of industry experts predicting that 3D printing will have a larger impact on the world than the Internet itself. It’s crazy to think about that, but when you read their predictions, it hard to ignore.

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The technological advances of the past two decades have changed the world, and education is no exception. Today’s students have access to far more knowledge than their parents once found in encyclopedias and on maps. With the click of a mouse and without leaving the classroom, they can access the collective knowledge of all mankind via the Internet.

But that’s not the only way technology is making it easier for students to learn. Technology is facilitating communication between students and teachers, fostering increased engagement through educational games, and making it easier than ever for non-traditional students to attend university for the first time or get the credentials they need to advance in their field or switch careers.

Students who use technology in the classroom perform better, and emerge from their educations better prepared for the challenges of adult life.

Technology in the Classroom Keeps Kids in School, Helps Them Learn

On the primary and high-school levels, schools that successfully integrate technology into their classrooms see increased performance, better behavior from students, and lowered drop-out rates.

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Coding has become the poster child for a tech-infused classroom. Over 15 million kids participated in Hour of Code this past December. So many teachers took students to Code.org’s curriculum offerings, the website crashed.

So what is ‘coding’? According to the Urban Dictionary, it’s another word for ‘programming’ which means:

The art of turning caffeine into Error Messages

Let’s go to Webster’s definition instead:

The act or job of creating computer programs

Not much better. To techies, ‘programming’ or ‘coding’ is

a series of symbols, used synonymously as text and grouped to imply or prompt the multimedia in the games and programs that happen on computers, websites, and mobile apps.

This complicated definition is why–historically–programming, IT, and Computer Science have been of interest only to the geekiest of kids. But there are good reasons why kids should like this activity. According to Computer Science Education Week:

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Technology and the connected world put a fork in the old model of teaching–instructor in front of the class, sage on the stage, students madly taking notes, textbooks opened to the chapter being reviewed, homework as worksheets based on the text, tests regurgitating important facts.

Did I miss anything?

This model is outdated not because it didn’t work (many statistics show students ranked higher on global testing years ago than they do now), but because the environment changed. Our classrooms are more diverse. Students are digital natives, already in the habit of learning via technology. The ‘college and career’ students are preparing for is different so the education model must be different.

Preparing for this new environment requires radical changes in teacher lesson plans. Here are seventeen concepts you’ll want to include in your preparation:

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After you’ve looked at these 28 sites, there’s no reason to print student work and stick it on a wall. You have too many options:

1. Book Cover creator
2. Create a magazine cover
3. Flipboard—organize ideas into mag
4. Glogster—posters
5. Go animate
6. Issuu (http://issuu.com/)
7. Newspaper—create a newspaper
8. Newspaper—create a newspaper clipping
9. Newspapers around the world
10. PhotoPeach–online slideshows
11. Poster maker—like an eye chart
12. Posters—8×10 at a time–simple
13. PowerPoint games for kids
14. PowerPoint stuff
15. PowerPoint Templates
16. Prezi
17. Print Large Posters in 8×10 bits
18. Print Posters One Page at a Time
19. Publish the magazines 
20. Scoop-it—organize webpages
21. Screen Capture—full webpage
22. Screencast-o-matic
23. ScreenLeap—screen share for free
24. Slideboom—upload PowerPoints; share
25. Tackk—create online fliers
26. Turn short stories into books
27. Wideo–create videos online
28. Youblisher to make your pdf documents flappable

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With technology moving out of the lab and into the classroom, it’s becoming a challenge for some teachers to infuse their teaching with tech tools such as websites, educational games, simulations, iPads, Chromebooks, GAFE, and other geeky devices that used to be the purview of a select group of nerdy teachers. Now, all teachers are expected to have students work, collaborate, research, and publish online.

I’m fine with that because I am that nerd, but if I was expected to integrate art into my classroom, I’d break out in a cold sweat and expect the worst. As the tech coordinator responsible for helping teachers use these tools in their classrooms, I hear too often from experienced, valuable, long-time teachers that they believe the time has come for them to retire, that they just don’t get this new stuff. I also have colleagues who think it takes a special brain to understand tech (the same way students think about math and science)–one they don’t have. If either of these educators are you, here are ten tips that will take the fear out of infusing tech into your lesson plans. Take these to heart–let them guide you. They will make a big difference in how you feel about yourself and your  class at the end of the day:

Make yourself use it every day

Even if you have to set aside ten minutes each day where you close the blinds and lock your door so no one sees your misery, do it. You don’t have to succeed with the tech tool you select, just use it. Whether it works or not is entirely beside the point. The point is you’re trying. You’re exploring the process. You’re unpacking the mysteries of tech in your academic career.

Believe this: The more you use tech, the more comfortable it will be, the more commonalities you’ll find between tools, and the easier it will be to share with students.

Try to figure it out yourself

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Let’s start by clearing up a misconception: Rigor isn’t unfriendly. Adding it to your class doesn’t mean you become boring, a techie, or overseer of a fun-free zone. In fact, done right, rigor fills your class with Wow, those epiphanies that bring a smile to student faces and a sense of well-being to their school day. Rigor provides positive experiences, is an emotional high, and engenders a pervasive sense of accomplishment students will carry for years–and use as a template for future events.

It is NOT:

• lots of homework
• lots of projects
• lots of resources
• lots of rules

When those are used to define rigor, the teacher is flailing–thinking quantity is quality. Rigor is not about adding a column of data or remembering the main characters in a Shakespeare novel. It’s seeing how that knowledge connects to life, to circumstances and to daily problems.

Simply put, adding rigor creates an environment where students are:

• expected to learn at high levels
• supported so they can learn at high levels
• cheered on as they demonstrate learning at high levels

It helps students understand how to live life using brain power as the engine. Sure, it will ask them to collect evidence and draw conclusions that may find disagreement among their peers. It will insist they defend a position or adjust it to reflect new information. And it will often move them outside their comfort zone. It will also prepare them to solve the problems they will face in the future.

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Playful Learning (Parents’ Choice Gold Medal website) is a well-done, professional-looking website that  offers advice, projects, and visual images touting the benefits of education through play. The reader is drawn into the child-centered imagery and strong basic colors, wanting everything on offer so their child’s play areas can look and work as described.

Let’s back up a moment. Play as the vehicle of education is not a revolutionary idea. Pedagogy has long recommended ‘play’ as a superior teacher for youngers–

Play is the great synthesizing, integrating, and developing force in childhood and adolescence. –PsycINFO Database Record 2012 APA,

The play of children is not recreation; it means earnest work. Play is the purest intellectual production of the human being, in this stage … for the whole man is visible in them, in his finest capacities, in his innermost being.~ Friedrich Froebel

In general, research shows strong links between creative play and language, physical, cognitive, and social development. Play is a healthy, essential part of childhood. —Department of Education, Newfoundland Labrador

Young children learn the most important things not by being told but by constructing knowledge for themselves in interaction with the physical world and with other children – and the way they do this is by playing.” –Jones, E., & Reynolds, G.  “The play’s the thing: Teachers’ roles in children’s play”

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Here are three tools that work-around problems you have every week–maybe every day–in your classes. Sit down with a cuppa and be prepared to be wowed.

This is a reprint of an article I posted last Spring. By starting these tasks in Fall, you’ll be ready when the yearly assessments arrive in April-May:

As part of my online tech teacher persona, I get lots of questions from readers about how to make technology work in an educational environment. This one from Terry is probably on the minds of thousands of teachers:

Any help for identifying and re-enforcing tech skills needed to take the online PARCC tests (coming in 2014-15)? Even a list of computer terms would help; copy, cut, paste, highlight, select; use of keys like tab, delete, insert; alt, ctrl and shift. There does not seem to be any guidelines as to prepping students on the “how to’s” of taking an online test and reading and understanding the directions. It would be great to take advantage of the time we have before the PARCC’s become a reality. Thanks!

Between March 24 and June 6 (2014), more than 4 million students in 36 states and the District of Columbia took near-final versions of the PARCC and Smarter Balanced efforts to test Common Core State Standards learning in the areas of mathematics and English/language arts. Tests were administered via digital devices (though there are options for paper-and-pencil). The tests weren’t intended to produce detailed scores of student performance (that starts next year), but field-testing was crucial to finding out what worked and didn’t in this comprehensive assessment tool, including the human factors like techphobia and sweaty palms (from both students and teachers).

After I got Terry’s email, I polled my PLN to find specific tech areas students needed help with in preparing for the Assessments. I got answers like these:

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