Is Technology Dangerous

Love this reaction from a pre-service teacher to a university lecturer in education about the dangers of technology.

However, the many benefits of e-learning are actually beside the point. The reality is that this is the direction that the world is ever more rapidly moving in, whether we think it is a good thing or not. I feel that we actually do a disservice to students by neglecting to develop their e-literacy, for in the future it will almost certainly be an integral part of their studies, employment, and indeed their social lives. Does the Internet pose certain dangers? Of course it does. That’s even more reason to be having conversations in our classrooms about Internet safety, bullying, and the nature of one’s digital footprint. As teachers, we have to prepare students for a future we cannot envision. The least we can do is educate them using tools from the present, instead of recycling the education of the past.

So why do some of my lecturer’s discourage me from using “technology”? I can’t say for sure, but I would guess that, as is so often the case, they fear it because they do not understand it. And that is fine. Long gone are the days where the teacher is the beacon of all knowledge. But if you don’t understand something, you need to be open to learning about it, and if you can’t manage that then you should probably stop trying to train pre-service teachers.- Is Technology Dangerous

The Freedom to Compose

I want to share something that struck me the other day.  In the morning I sat in on a few classes sitting for a PARCC field test.  High school students were taking the literature analysis section of PARCC.  After analyzing a few passages and a video, students had to address a prompt in a text box.  I imagine students were required to cite evidence from the various texts to support their claim.  The question mirrored everything we have been hearing about the types of questions students will face on PARCC.

In the afternoon I joined 4th grade teachers for a PD session on informational writing.  As part of the workshop the presenter had all of us spend time examining several informational texts.  The purpose was to develop an understanding of the varying types of text structures through which informational writing could be expressed.  In addition to the texts, the presenter also shared a couple of videos, including a rap video about the Industrial Revolution some students created.

While walking around the room, examining different texts I started to think back to the PARCC exam in the morning.  For PARCC students were required to demonstrate an understanding in a very traditional structure.  Students had to read and respond in writing and do so within the confines of a text box.  Contrast that structure with some of the images provided below.  Authors such as Steve Jenkins and Nicola Davies present an idea through leveraging different text structures and through strategically placing images on the page.  

Of great concern is that as educators we only ask our students to produce products which mirror the outcomes expected for mandated exam.  As opposed to creating an environment where students have the freedom to compose an idea, rigid assessment structures are established.  To be completely transparent I would rather see high school students be faced with the challenge of creating a book similar to texts authored by Steve Jenkins or Nicola Davies.  As opposed to sitting for a two hour PARCC ELA exam, give high school students the challenge of having to publish an informational mentor text for 4th graders.  A challenge such as this incorporates essential core literacies, privileges research, values creativity, and is also authentic.  Design thinking elements are included in the task.  In designing a book for 4th graders student authors would have to consider their audience and think deeply about how to hook a 4th grader.  The latter might even lead high school students to interview 4th graders before crafting an informational text.

In the end of this fictitious task who knows what students could produce. What’s important is that students see the various ways  to express an opinion and that classrooms provide freedom when it comes to composition.  

To What End

I am a few hours way from beginning PARCC field testing.  PARCC field tests come two weeks after delivering HSPA exams and few weeks before the the administration of state testing for 3rd-8th graders.  In some ways it is wasteful to complain.  The reality is that we have to prepare for a battery of mandated state exams.  However, it's impossible not to be concerned over the amount of time and energy devoted towards the administration of state exams.  

I came across two posts last night having to do with increased state testing and the looming presence of the Common Core.  Both posts are skeptical of high stakes testing and worry about the collateral damage caused by a "closed" system of schooling (see A Passion for Possibility).  I am sharing excerpts from both posts below.  The first is from the blog Between the By-Road and Main Road and titled A Passion for Possibility.  The second is a letter Will Richardson received from a mother of an elementary student. 

 I would certainly read both posts.  Even though the authors approach the topic of high stake testing from different emotional perches, the pieces, in my estimation, are aligned in highlighting what could be lost as we stand on the brink of introducing a new testing model.  After reading both posts I could not help but think about the end game and what it is really is we hope to achieve through forwarding the Common Core and committing to PARCC.



A Passion of Possibility:
When I think about listening I wonder about about learning--how learning ought to open us--ought to be largely a matter of possibility, not certainty.  And yet, the desire to be certain when confronting an unknown and have it named often determines us and what we value--be it in our homes, our hearts, or our schools.  Consider Maxine Greene who tells us:

We are not the first to feel a slippage under our feet, to grope for a “point d’appui,” something to stand on, a platform, a ground. Like so many of our predecessors, many of us grope wildly for security. We seek a certainty of protection, of salvation.  (from here)

But what is the price we pay for security?  I can't help but think of the cool comfort standards and high stakes testing have offered--twin methods we have been embracing since we were told we were a nation at risk.  Frightened of our limitations, we wondered who might we trust? And in the ensuing years we have learned most not to trust ourselves, our very eyes and ears. We substitute certainty and completeness that wrap itself around national standards and national tests for the slippages we feel when we stand on our own feet atop a world that is always in motion. 

When I think about the CCSS and other educational certainties it is the sameness--the way the language parses itself so neatly, so predictably that most confounds me as it concerns me. Consider how likely it is that David Coleman and company, could name for millions of children (at least those enrolled in public US schools) what they most need to learn and when. Standards are a closed system. And yet, if meaning is most revealed as Bakhtin says when it comes in contact with other, then what might we make of this rather closed movement of educational standards--self-referential, monologic?  Hegemonic?


One Mom's Struggle With School and Tests
For too many nights to count, I have watched my child come apart at the seams trying to make sense of homework that I deem to be complete and utter bullshit and a complete waste of time. I watch her write letters, words and numbers…. only to erase and write again, erase and write again…. because it’s not perfect, it’s not what the teacher said to do, it’s not what will get her perfect scores and make everyone happy. I watch her trying to think of multiple ways to write out a math sentence such as ‘5+4=9’. I mean, how many ways does a 7 year old need to write it? She even gets math equations that look like this: ‘16+12=__’. Ask her what the ones and tens places are and she couldn’t tell you. (I have explained them to her… and she is beginning to understand, but isn’t allowed to use that method at school(WTF?). The math that is being taught isn’t math at all. Its all comprehension. Why is she getting comprehension shoved down her throat before she even has the basic building blocks in the fundamentals of addition and subtract? I know the answer - NJ ASK. I’m sick of erasing, and the tears and wasted nights. I sick of watching this beautiful creature being snuffed out by school work that really isn’t teaching anything.

You Have To Laugh

As much as anyone I look forward to March Madness.  Even though I seem to be one of those rare basketball fans who enjoys the NBA game more than college, the NBA takes a backseat to tournament games over the next three weeks.  I genuinely enjoy watching tournament games.  The intensity inherent in a game where so much is riding on every single play and or coaching decision is enthralling.  My daughters are incredulous when they ask who I am rooting for and most times I do not care.  It is about the organic authentic drama unique to each game.

Over the years I have become less and less interested in the brackets.  I can't remember the last time I actually filled out a bracket.  It seems as if joining a pool and completing brackets has become an American pastime up there with the likes of fireworks on the 4th of July.  Again, it is about the games regardless of which team is playing.  For that matter making sure I am in front of the television when the tournament field is announced has also become a trivial occurrence. Last night, however, we had family over who wanted to watch the brackets unveiled so we watched.

I missed most of the brackets and came into the room when ESPN's roundtable of commentators were discussing the fate certain "bubble teams" and in particular those schools which failed to make the tournament.  After discussing amongst themselves the merit of several bubble teams as well as the seeding of top tier teams, NCAA Men's 
Basketball committee chairman, Ron Wellman was interviewed by ESPN.  The exact interview is not shared below but another conducting after the selection program has ended.  At one point during the interview one of the ESPN commentators asked a question about some of the teams who failed to make field.  In multiple cases Ron Wellman referenced strength of schedule as a factor used to determine the merits of at-large teams and in the case of those schools which failed to qualify for the tournament, their out of conference schedule(s) was weak.

I could not help but laugh every time I heard the committee chair reference a school's out of conference schedule.  So basically, the selection committee was either rewarding or punishing schools based in part by who they played on a Wednesday night in December.  As an educator ( and even as a former college basketball coach), I could not help but laugh at the hypocrisy associated with big time college athletics.   Here we were last night with a representative from the NCAA chiding teams for who they played out of conference.  So forget about classes and if need be criss cross the country to make sure your strength of schedule can be checked off on your tournament resume.  I know this sounds hypocritical on my part.  If I were so enraged I would boycott March Madness.  This is not going to happen.  I was more taken back by the flippant nature with which the NCAA reasoned about who one should play regardless of how this impact academics.

Bridging the Gap

Last week I had the chance to attend Social Media Week in New York City.  I got a day pass to Thursday's string of presentations, demonstrations and discussions.  Five minutes into Meredith Kopit Levien's (she is the Executive Vice President, Advertising for the NY Times) on the "Art and Science of Storytelling" a long-held personal belief was reaffirmed.  I have always believed that a barrier cannot exist between the professional world and education.   Furthermore, education cannot exist in a fiercely protected bubble, isolated from changes happening outside the walls of a school building.

I'm sure I am not alone when it comes to this opinion.  In fact, justification for the Common Core is to ensure that K-12 students are developing college and career readiness skills.  Even though there is an intense effort underway to make sure our students can successfully compete on a global level, what is being done or what should be done to make sure educators truly understand how the business world is changing?  There are educators who come to teaching from "industry" but this is not the case for what I assume are most k-12 educators.  I would imagine (having never done any official study) that a majority of k-12 teachers have only worked in education.  This reality presents an issue when it comes to making sure students are career ready upon graduating or after 2/4 years of post-secondary schooling.  

Finding ways to bridge the divide between education and commerce is critical.  For me, last Thursday was a perfect opportunity to gain insight into the world beyond schools.  The presentation by Meredith Levien was more thought-provoking than deconstructing reading and writing anchor statements.  In sharing how the Times views storytelling, Meredith Levien juxtaposed an article posted on the Times website from the 2004 olympics in Athens, Greece to articles posted about the games in Sochi.  For an example from the 2014 games Meredith Levien referenced a profile the Times did on American skier Ted Ligety.  As opposed to the piece from 2004 which relied heavily on text to express a point, the profile on Ligety relied on a multimodal approach to demonstrate the way in which Ligety has come to dominate Giant Slalom racing.  Through leveraging a variety of communication mediums, the Times is able to present to readers Ligety's significance to the sport of skiing.

While sitting in on Levien's presentation and certainly afterwards, I was inspired to think about we approach storytelling with students.  Here was the NY Times, a globally recognized figure in the field of journalism, showing how storytelling has evolved.  I kept thinking about the idea of college readiness or whether we were creating an environment where students told stories in the same spirit as what Meredith Levien shared.  Having the chance to "live" outside of a school, even if it was for one day, provided the chance to view teaching and learning through a different and truly needed perspective.  

Worth Reading..

Sharing highlights from the past week.

1. Creativity Becomes An Academic Discipline (Pappano)- growing number of degrees undergraduate and graduate in creativity

Traditional academic disciplines still matter, but as content knowledge evolves at lightning speed, educators are talking more and more about “process skills,” strategies to reframe challenges and extrapolate and transform information, and to accept and deal with ambiguity.

2. Forget Coding, Let's Change Up How We Teach Math (Burt)- leveraging Math (as a space) to teach code and to eternally address questions of will I ever use this outside of school...

One of the most common obstacles we hear about why schools don’t teach computer science is that there aren’t enough qualified educators out there to meet the demands.  But there’s a trained army of math teachers out there willing to find new and better ways of delivering their content, that with a small amount of preparation could no doubt be leading the way.  So, how can we make time in their curricula and schedule to make it happen?

3. Passion-Based Learning, Day 1: Probing Minecraft's Appeal (Renwick)- thoughts about why Minecraft appeals to students and what lessons to learn from why there is an intense interest in Minecraft.

When someone enters Minecraft, the world is their’s to create. They are in control of their destiny. What a stark contrast to our students’ lives in school. The standards are set, the assessments are pre-determined, and the plans have been prepared. All without the students’ input. If this is their learning to own, we don’t always do a very good job of including them in the process.

4. Making Ourselves Vulnerable (Richardson)

Walk down the vendor floor of any big edu-conference and you’ll see our obsession with making learning less messy and less “vulnerable.” Struggle, patience, courage, persistence, failure, passion…none of these are quantifiable to the degree that reformers or most edupreneurs need them to be to “count.” Yet schools will spend time and money (lots of it) on stuff that organizes, compartmentalizes, personalizes, standardizes, and captures “learning” in order to be compared “successfully” to other districts down the road.

5. Rethinking Education With Design Thinking (Pfau)-highlights schools in the Bay area where design thinking influences work with kids

Students not only master the concepts embedded within each project, they also exercise their skills of collaborating with teammates, investigating their topic thoroughly, using empathy to generate ideas for solutions, prototyping, testing and most importantly, they learn that failure is not a setback. As Gever explained in his talk, the retention of information that kids have as a result of this process is significantly higher. More significantly, learning to identify the need for and acquire skills in response to problem solving situations is a life long skill set that will better shape these kids to confront productive careers that address real world problems.

6. School In the Cloud Report- A brief introduction to the School In the Cloud project

7. Art, made with coding: calling future interactive artisits- In between creating masterpieces like the Sistine Chapel and “Madonna and Child,” Michelangelo dissected cadavers in the hopes of understanding how the human body worked so he could paint it accurately. He’s not the only one: there has long been a connection between science and art. And it’s true today more than ever, as modern artists use technology for inspiration, inventing ways to give life to code, letting it spill from the screen and onto the canvas.

Snow Day Walk

A few shots from around town while walking the dog.