Let’s Hear it for the Power of Technology! LOL!

I know of a person who does not have any technology in his room accept for a 70s looking overhead.  One day he decided to walk around  his institute and see how the teachers who had technology in their room was using it.  9/10 rooms were using the “elmo” type device to show a handout, a passage from a book, etc.  They were using their fully Internet capable machine as a modern day opaque projector which would project the image of anything put inside it. The one other person was showing a DVD.  How much money has been invested in technology so that people can use technology from the past such as a DVD player or an opaque projector!   Educational institutes need to take a lead in helping their teachers to use the many educational resources that are available.  Perhaps at each faculty meeting there can be a five  minute demonstration  of various ways to use technology to improve student learning in powerful ways.

What does a walk around your school reveal about technology use and student learning?

My new book,  Successful Student Writing Through Formative Assessment, is available through Eye on Education.

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Your Students, is available through Eye on Education.

Improving How We Use Wikis for Better Student Learning

Here are some handout notes for the session:

Harry Grover Tuttle, Ed. D.
Instructor, writer, consultant
harry.g.tuttle   at   gmail.com
Blog: http://eduwithtechn.wordpress.com

Purpose: To improve students’ learning through changing how we use wikis in our classroom.

Formative Assessment Focus

Improvements:

• 1. Teach the mechanics

  2. Identify the learning goal/purpose

  3. Explain the quality of responses

  4. Use students’ notes

  5. Organize the class

  6. Provide in-class and out-of-class resources by learning style

  7. Avoid common web topics

  8. Make learning “collective wisdom” instead of  “collective stupidity”
     

  9. Have exemplary work and reactions to the exemplars
     

  10. Build in real and varied interaction

  11. Build on the past

  12. Make group work transparent

  13. Have a student-help-student section

  14. Carefully use outside experts and other classes

  15. Co-create with students

A wiki has been created for you to add to  http://wikiforbetterlearning.pbwiki.com/

A mini version of the presentation is available at slideshare

Dr. Tuttle’s book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students which is available from Eye-on-Education includes numerous ways that technology can be used in formative assessment.

Organic Learning With Technology or Inorganic Learning?

I drove past a farmer’s stand that proudly proclaimed itself as organic. I laughed. When I was growing up on a farm, everything was organic. Cows produced the fertilizer for the fields.

I wonder if we have made changes to make the learning process less organic. Have we gone to using technologies in which that might reduce learning? Do our PowerPoints truly energize the learners into deeper learning or do the PowerPoints put them to sleep? Does the time we have the students spend on creating a podcast really reflect in-depth learning about the course’s standard or does the time reflect surface only learning over multiple days? Do our students spend time in responding to others in a blog when the other people do not read their comments? Do our students spend time in creating fancy projects that include many visuals when the visuals do not add more meaning to the project? Do we have students create the same information on a wiki that is presently available in another location? Do we have students virtually visit a location (like a zoo) without having them learn critical standards information?

Have we used technology to interfere with students’ learning instead of helping them to grow in-depth and comprehensively in the standards? How organic is your classroom or have you covered it with harmful fertilizers?

For any one who is interested in implementing formative assessment in the classroom, my book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students is available through Eye-on-Education

Panic Attack: Chalk is the Technology in the classroom

I’m teaching as an adjunct at a community college which is part of the state system. I was shocked when I went into my classrooms and discovered that chalk was the technology. There was a dusty overhead in the corner. There was no computer and no LCD. For as many years as I can remember I’ve had a computer and projector in my classroom. Now when I want to use images in the classroom, color coded items in a paragraph, graphics to highlight a writing aspect, Youtube clips as a writing prompt, I cannot. Apparently, English teachers do not need technology. This English teacher does!

I am finding it very hard to go backward in terms of teaching. I’ve covered the chalkboard, erased it, and written over it again. So much wasted time. Each class is in a different room so I have to rewrite the same thing. I certainly am not going to write a long paragraph on the board.

I may have to  resort to buying transparencies so that at least I can show some items- about $1.50 per transparency. I may use up my pay for the courses just in transparencies.

I need  technology for my classroom so that I can spend more time teaching and less time writing on the chalkboard.

Birth of a Child and Hope for the Future

My grandson, Rowan, was born yesterday early in the morning. Mom and Dad are doing fine. As I ponder what his life will be like I focus in on his schooling and technology. I think about my many years of teaching and my son’s educational experience. The last school district I was in had limited technology -every teacher did not have an LCD; in fact we shared one within the department of 20 people. There were a few mini-labs but there were many thousands of students and their teachers vying for those labs. My son had many excellent teachers and some not so good ones. A few teachers used technology but he had more technology at home than in school.  I think that maybe schools have changed but then I think about my working with a large city school district for the past year and I know that some schools have not changed. They have not changed in terms of curriculum and in terms of using technology to create in-depth learning experiences.

Have we fundamentally changed how and what we teach? How we globally integrated technology to provide probing learning experiences? What will be different in five years when he starts his first formal schooling? What will cause a change?  I wish the best for Rowan in his schooling!

Formative Assessment & Technology Workshop: Hands-On or Minds-On

I am doing a two hour formative assessment and technology “hands-on” workshop this weekend. I do not like “hands-on” workshops since they imply that the physical activity is the focus of the workshop. I prefer “minds-on” workshops where the participants spend time thinking and then they may do something on the computer. In the past, I have been amazed when people finish my workshop and they complain that they “didn’t use the technology very much so why were we in a lab?” They have just seen ten different examples of formative assessment that use various technologies; they have seen simple yet highly effective ways of integrating formative assessment into the class. They know how to implement these techniques. However, they want to complain about not using technology very much. I would like their focus to be on education and not technology.

Cherry Picking Metaphor For Technology Integration

One summer I worked picking cherries. I would move a tall ladder into a cherry tree and pick as many cherries as I could from that one location before I would get down and move the ladder to another section of that same tree.

What if I told you that I moved the ladder to one tree, picked one cherry, moved the ladder to another tree, picked one cherry, and continued tree by tree picking one cherry each time? You would think I was crazy! Yet isnt’ that what many technology integration teachers do? They work with one teacher in one building, go to another building and work with one teacher, go to another building and work with one teacher. When they are done, they have a few cherries in their basket.

What if they had a cherry picking mentality of working with a large group of teachers from the same building – perhaps, all 7th grade social studies teachers, perhaps all English teachers at the high school, or perhaps all elementary teacher in one building interested in using a wiki in their classroom? By working with a group, there can be group momentum and collaboration. The technology integration teacher can work with a larger group at once in the same building and help them to be successful in learning how to integrate the technology into the classroom. The classroom teachers can feel excited by the success of their students in improved learning through the onsite mentoring of the technology integration teacher.The technology integration teacher can collect many cherries at once; he or she can share with the building principal a big success instead of just working with one person. The technology integration teacher can collect large groups of cherries in each building; therefore, they have a huge basket of cherries in just a few months.

How do you collect technology integration cherries?

Digital Classroom – Technology Rich or Technology Poor

In one room that I teach I have a desktop and an LCD. Not even a printer. It is very difficult to be a Web 2.0 class when there are not computers for students. It is hard to be a Web 1.0 when I just have the one computer. There is no Smartboard, no clickers, or nor other interactive technologies. I’m the only interactive technology. The Tech Director had to modify settings to allow me to use programs like YouTube. There are two log-ins. Sometimes technology is almost too difficult to use.

Yes, I do use technology in class but it takes effort to figure out how to do it interactively. Students answer questions in turn instead of individually answering questions like they would  do if they had their own computers.  Students cannot move at their own pace, they move in -lock step.  Students cannot take online quizzes to measure their progress.

Let’s get rid of digital divide! Let’s harness the  power for learning that technology brings to the classroom.

Sensationalizing Weather and Technology Benefits

I’ve noticed this year that the weather people tend to sensationalize the weather just as the news reporters do with the news. They predict horrible storms and we get a few inches.  They warn about possible ice conditions that could making driving extremely difficult and then we get a very thin layer of ice that melts away in a few hours.

I wonder how much we sensationalize the effects of technology.  My class is doing so much better due to ……

Some questions we might want to ask ourselves:

Do we assess how much the students are learning  with the “new” technology through an assessment instrument? Is that assessment instrument similar to one we normally use in class?  Similar to one used on our school final or a state assessment?

Are we noticing the students’ excitement and motivation and misinterpreting those as their learning?

Has the “new” technology allowed our students to probe more in-depth than without the technology? What evidence do we have?

Does more student talk or even student talk with others in distinct locations give students a more comprehensive learning about the goal? What measurable evidence do we have?

Have we restructured how our students do learning activities in the classroom? Is that restructuring the real cause of the student learning and the technology is just the context of the learning?

Has the “new” technology allowed our students to make more mental connections among their learning?  How do you measure those connections by using concept maps or other assessment tools?

Technology Widespread and Frequent or One Example

I like watching weight lost ads. They say a person has lost 100 pounds and then in small print they say “Results not typical”.

What results are typical? Do we do the same technique with technology use in our schools? Are technology-uses widespread (more than the majority use it)? Are technology uses frequent (i.e. they use it often)? If not, then we are using the weight ad trick.

Should we be boasting about the one teacher who has used a specific technology such as a Web 2.0 to promote learning? Or should we wait and then boast about all of our the teachers who use that technology to promote learning? Do we create the illusion about the benefits of technology through telling about one teacher or do we show the overwhelming reality of it when many teachers have their students improve their higher-level learning through technology?

Are your results typical?

Technology Impact and a budget vote

The email is down at my institution. Students are screaming. Office people cannot get anything done. Instructors can not communicate with their students.

Often times people take technology for granted. However, when a problem arises, then they take notice.

I heard a story about a director of technology whose network, unfortunately, went down a few days just before a budget vote that involved a substantial and debated major increase for his department. As soon as he said that with these new budget purchases he could probably prevent such outages, he got every penny he had asked for. It was only when people realize what they can not do without technology that they realize how important it is

Sometimes the absence of something speaks louder than its presence.

Simple yet powerful technology

I believe that when a technology is simple to use, then teachers will use it.  Witness the Smartboard and the Document camera.  Simple technologies can be powerful technologies.  They do not require thousands of hours of professional development. They do not require long learning curves.  Teachers “get it” and can use them.   They can involve their students in that technology with minimal prep.  I think that often we over look simple technologies like word processing, digital camera, document  cameras, and smartboards. Let’s promote technologies that teachers can and will use instead of complex technologies that often require someone else to set things up like videoconferencing.  Let’s focus on what teachers have in their classrooms!