Mar/100
Technology and Priorities
I am at the SITE conference in San Diego, and after 1.5 days of presentations I have heard one theme emerge above all others. This theme can be reduced to one question, "Why do students, who use technology in almost every aspect of their lives, seem so clueless when it comes to using it in their teaching and learning?" You may have seen versions of this conversation framed in other ways: digital natives vs. digital immigrants, 21st Century learning, Content-creators, Millennial Students, etc. The assumption on the part of teacher educators is that students who love technology in certain areas of their lives should love it in their learning and teaching.
I would like to suggest a radical idea: teens and college students don't love technology. They love what they can do with technology, which is to address their priorities and motivations. Take technology out of the picture, and this is what I know about college students:
- They like to have fun
- They are more likely to listen to their friends than their parents or professors
- They like to be entertained
- They are confronted with a lot of information that has challenged their worldview, and they are trying to make sense of it all
- They view their classes as something they have to do to a) stay in college and be with their friends and b) graduate and move on to the next phase of their lives
So, why do students know so much about certain technologies yet know so little about other types of technology (e.g., educational/learning technology)? The technologies they know and use help them address their priorities, and as sad as it may seem, being a life-long learner is not a priority for them at this stage in their lives.
I spend a lot of time talking to teacher candidates about knowing their students and meeting where they are in their skills, abilities and prior knowledge. As a teacher educator, I must do the same with my students. I need to understand their priorities and motivations, and meet them where they are.
Oct/090
My Band plays in a Garage in the Cloud
I recently read about a suite of web-based tools hosted by aviary.com, and I was quickly blown away. Most of the tools are for image editing, but they recently added an audio editor. Each of these tools is web based ,which means they require no downloads, installations or updates. Each time one of these tools comes out (e.g., Google Sites, Weebly, PBWiki, ScreenToaster), I can feel a new life being breathed into my teaching.
When I was teaching ed tech classes, I was always hesitant to show my students applications like Photoshop, Camtasia and Dreamweaver. These programs are powerful and may very well be useful to teachers, but they required a massive leap from what the preservice teachers already knew to what they needed to learn to be successful with them. At different times, I dabbled with the tools, but the focus quickly turned to the tool itself and I would be inundated with e-mails about how to do this or that. I know there are folks who consider the ability to use these tools a necessary literacy for teachers in the 21st Century, but I chose to keep our discussions and projects grounded in pedagogy and the classroom. This makes choosing tools for different projects quite difficult. On top of their complexity, there is the issue of cost and accessibility. If I in fact wanted my students to use these tools and strategies as teachers, it hardly made sense to rely on expensive software that they would a) not have access to once they left the university and b) had to come to the computer lab to use. Using Everett Rogers' criteria for "adoptable innovations" as my framework, it made sense to me to use tools whose trialability, observability, compatibility, relative advantage and complexity matched the needs of teachers.
It just so happens that in the last few years, as more schools are experimenting with student-created digital media, the tools to create these media have been moving to the Cloud. For example, I was eventually able to replace Dreamweaver with Google Page Creator (now Google Sites), and I noticed immediately that the "how do I make a picture show up on my website" questions vanished. Our conversations shifted to questions about pedagogy and implementation with students in their classes. However, until recently there were no suitable web-based alternatives for editing images and audio, or for creating screencasts. I still had to rely on desktop programs for podcasts, and I got pretty good as using PPT as an omnibus program for all things related to digital images.
Well, I have recently discovered, thanks to TechCrunch, a suite of new tools that may potentially transform (yet again) the way I do things. Aviary has developed a web-based audio editor that allows users to record, mix and download audio files without ever leaving the browser. The interface is extremely easy to use, and you can add up to 10 tracks. Worried about copyright for the audio clips students put in their projects? Myna (the name of the audio editor) provides over 14,500 loops for users to mix into their recordings. Of course, if you are planning on becoming the next Jared Hess or Brian Ibbott, you will need to get permission before using the music loops, distributed by APM Music. Creating an account is free, and you can either save the audio file online or download it to your computer. Needless to say, I am very eager to test this out and see if it's feasible for my students to use. Here is a screenshot of Myna (captured with Aviary's screen capture tool ... of course).
Sep/090
Good teaching is hard to model
I was a school teacher for 8 years, and by my own standards (as well as the feedback from parents, students and principals) I did a pretty good job. Sure, there were aspects of my teaching that, when stacked up against the literature I encountered in grad school, would have been labeled less than exemplary. But I think in most respects I was effective, had a good relationship with the students and parents and my students left my class with a lot more knowledge and skills than they came in with. The problem with all of this is that it occurred within my classroom and was only observed by my students and me. And my students weren't really critiquing my teaching. They were active participants in the process and the reason the teaching was taking place.
Contrast this with my current teaching assignment. I teach about teaching. So, when I tell the students they should do this or that, I need to model this or that. When I was a teacher, I would try implementing this or that, and sometimes would continue using this and completely abandon that. And it ended there. My teaching strategies were the means to an end ... student learning. Now, the end is parallel to the means. I want my students to learn good teaching techniques, but I also feel this pressure to use good teaching techniques in order to teach them. It would be far easier to plan a lecture, flip through some slides and give a test. But it seems to me that the best way to teach certain pedagogical approaches -- say, cooperative learning -- is to design lessons that implement those pedagogical approaches. Additionally, they can't be done in a "community of practice" sense either, where I make some mistakes and we talk about the teachable moments and learn from the things the professor screwed up on. The lessons need to be delivered with precision and completely thought through. I feel at times like I am stuck in some performance assessment nightmare, where I am being judged not only on my knowledge of the content but also by my delivery of the content.
When the preservice teachers have had a chance to participate in the teaching strategy, it seems to me, we have something to talk about. They observed/participated in it, and now we can talk about it in real terms, rather than treating the teaching strategy like some straw man that everyone beats down yet has no real experience with. As my advisor used to say, it's easy to stand on the sidelines and throw rocks, but it's a lot harder to actually do something meaningful and thoughtful. Of course, he was referring to publishing, but it also applies to the art of teaching.
This is all fresh on my mind because I just gave a lecture to my students on how to lecture. My talk was well planned out, and I had a lot of good suggestions for the students. But as I reflected on the class, I was struck that I didn't do some of the things I had told my students they should do when lecturing to students. Strategies such as providing students with a note-taking template and using questioning to check for comprehension and engage the listeners. Basically, I didn't feel like I effectively modeled what I was telling my students they should do in their lectures.
This brings me back to the title. Good teaching is hard to do. It takes a lot of extra time that the teacher will really never get paid for. That never really mattered to me because the standards I set for myself were always higher than those imposed by other people. Good teaching really is hard to do, but it's even harder to model.
Sep/090
Is there such a thing as a toss-aside course?
I used to hear from students that my technology course was commonly regarded by their advisors as a class they should "just get out of the way early." I don't think the advisors were referring to my course specifically, but rather the required technology course in that program in general. The course is primarily taught by grad students, so there is a new instructor every 2-3 years. I don't think the faculty members even try to keep up with who is teaching the class every semester, unless the grad student takes the initiative to meet the faculty.
Most of my students enjoyed my class and would make comments about how much they learned. I think this is the case for most educational technology classes, where most of the students have never seen technology modeled well by their teachers or professors. Their expectations coming into the class are pretty low, and this isn't helped by the attitude held by most of the advisors that it is a toss-aside class. In some ways these pre-existing attitudes act as a barrier, but I think more often than not they created a perfect opportunity to blow the students' minds and help them completely reframe how they think about, and hopefully use, technology in the classroom.
Another common theme, beside the belief that they would have to endure my class until December or May, respectively, is that I was going to teach them how to do a bunch of stuff. I would always ask them at the beginning of the term what they expected to learn from the class, and their responses were almost unanimously, "How to make a ... " or "How to use ... program." This is important, but I don't think I ever heard someone say, "I want to learn how to support learning in social studies (or any other content area) through technology," or "I would like to learn how to plan a technology-based lesson." Technology was typically regarded as the thing a teacher adds in at the end, throws in for a diversion or uses for his/her own productivity. This context is a fertile ground for discussions on student learning, content, teaching strategies, classroom management and student engagement. Students were so focused on the how question, they rarely considered the why question. Why should teachers use technology? Is this even the right question? Maybe a better question is, what do I want my students to learn, and what are the best resources I can use to help them get there? What would motivate my students to want to get there? What do my students learn on their own when there are no teachers, parents or grades in the picture, and how do they learn it? You can hardly ask a question like this, framed within the context of the 21st century, without mentioning technology. Clearly, there needs to be a change in the way technology is thought about and presented in schools of education, and I think a lot of programs are moving in that direction.
So, to answer my own question, no I don't think there is any such thing as a toss-aside course. The approach and delivery may need some work, but the content -- the big idea of technology's role in teaching and learning -- is just as important as it has ever been.
