I spent far too much time today on this image…….

But first

What are the key elements required for a transformation of teaching and learning through the use of technology?  There are obviously many reasonable ways to look at this.  From what position do you view this issue?  Are you a teacher, instructional coach, building principal, technology facilitator, director of technology, chief administrative officer of some flavor, superintendent, parent, or student?  For you, this issue will likely run through the filter of your current position.

It will also run through the filter of your experience.  Are you an eighteen year old student who lives a life that is highly digitally integrated, or are you a teacher of 20 years or more who is just now trying to become familiar with the Internet as it relates to teaching and learning?  Are you a superintendent or head of school who is beginning to open to the importance of a smart approach to technology integration, or are you a technology facilitator who has been a digital evangelist for the past five to ten years?

Those filters should all be applied to the problem of how to retool schools along the lines of technological transformation.  (Though I didn’t think it worked in the title of this post, you will see below that I would rather use the term transformation as opposed to integration.)  At this point, the vast majority of school systems are behind the curve in this area.  Being this far behind might just have one distinct advantage.  If there is no way to see any of the individual trees in a forest, you are likely going to be forced to start your mission with a whole-forest view to begin with.  This is not a bad thing.  It allows you to realize two important things:

1) You don’t need a flashlight.  It’s not that dark in there anymore.  Trust that there are others who have proceeded down this path before you, and they have learned many important lessons.  Collaborate.  Learn from their successes and failures.  Do not go it alone.  Resist the temptation to slap a digital device in the hands of each student and call it success.  Have a plan.

2) Rarely do we get to make decisions with the clarity that a little distance provides.  Take your time (but hurry).  Ask yourself: what can we do with these new tools available today that we couldn’t do before?  If we could remake our curriculum any way we wanted, how would we do it?  Think transformation of the way teaching and learning is done in your district, as opposed to integration into it as it exists.

Allow me to run this challenge through my own filter for the next several paragraphs.  For more on my filter for these ideas, consult the About page.  Also-  I certainly do not profess to know all of the answers.  I am currently sitting on top of a nice little foothill of educational technology leadership…  and staring up at some pretty massive peaks ahead.  Allow me to talk about a few things that make these peaks seem climbable from where I stand.

It is my belief that all schools (and/or school systems) need the following four pillars below any technology “integration” effort…

An Innovation engine

All systems need what I will call an “innovation engine.”  Whatever the system, whatever the setup, schools and school systems need pockets of sponsored innovation.  Without some folks directly charged with instructional innovation with digital tools, we will always be just trying to fit technology into what we do on a day to day basis.  It is far better to build innovation directly into the system, and to foster it purposefully.  I know this may seem somewhat fringe in the world of public education, but it can’t afford to be much longer.

“At enlightened, forward-thinking companies, managers understand the connection between learning, innovation, and higher productivity — in fact, employees at these companies may even be encouraged to spend time learning and experimenting with new technologies.”

~Joe McKendrick, FASTforward

So who will drive this engine of innovation in your school?  Will this be a technology facilitator?  Will it be a technology coach?  Perhaps an instructional coach.  A ad-hoc committee of teachers?  A requirement of your leadership team or department heads?  If you are thinking of this from a district perspective, where does this responsibility land?  Will you just hope for it, or will you truly sponsor innovation in new approaches to teaching and learning afforded by digital technologies?

Administrative support

An innovative technology leader will be of little use beyond their immediate world without direct, purposeful and inspired administrative support.  Administrators:  join forces with your innovation team.  Learn what they learn.  Push them to new heights.  Allow them to bring innovative approaches to the classrooms and teachers of your school.  Support your teachers every step of the way as they slowly transform the classroom environments they create toward new and better approaches to learning…

…and then hold them to it. Hold staff accountable for bringing their skills up to the present realities of the 21st Century.  We’ve been living passively in this century for almost ten years now.  It is time for all of us to sit up and take a direct and active role in the changes happening within the learning profession.  Without strong administrative support, advocacy, and supervision, no real and lasting changes of the magnitude are possible.  Guidelines for such leadership aren’t exactly guesswork.  Grab a copy of the NETS and familiarize yourself with these standards today if you have yet to.  They come in three fine flavors:  for students, teachers and administrators.

Unfiltered ubiquitous access

So now you have innovation closely coupled with administrative support.  With those two things, you can get a pretty immediate return for your buck, provided one more terribly important thing:  that you don’t filter the very usefulness out of the web. A school can have instructional innovation and local administrative support and still fail with regard to technology integration.  How do you kill innovation quickly?  Tie it down.  Even today, many schools filter all of the good, interactive raw materials right out of the web.  Figure it out, people.  Ask a school who only lightly filters.  Ask.  Don’t assume there isn’t another way.

Our school system does currently block Facebook and MySpace.  However, our general approach is to put the filters in place required by law, and then keep the real Internet open for education.  Yes, that means we have open access to YouTube, Flickr, UStream, Ning, Twitter, Blogs, Wikis, etc…  We have our hands on far too much fuel for innovation to even worry about looking at Facebook and MySpace at this moment.  They are where our students already are.  But for now, we are luckier than 95% of school districts I encounter.  This fact has allowed us to move quickly toward figuring out the advantages and disadvantages of these powerful new tools in an educational setting.

Oh, and ubiquity.  Access to these tools must be easy and everywhere.  Soon after access is all around you, it doesn’t even feel like “technology,” it just feels like the way things are done.  This is a good thing, for when technology becomes invisible, we can finally focus on the value added from new uses of these tools.  The world is moving quickly toward wireless access in all corners.  If your school isn’t wireless, then only your students have wireless access.  That’s right-  via their phones.  You have a cell phone policy in your school?  Don’t kid yourself.  Your students are on the raw, unfiltered Internet via the 3G connection of their cellphone more often in the classroom than you care to admit.  Why ignore this…   or worse yet, why punish it?  Embracing might just be the answer.  Try it.

If your school isn’t at a 1:1 ratio of students to laptop computers… and the students don’t take them home with them night by night, all year long… then you don’t yet have an ideal learning environment for 2009 in my opinion.  However, there are other ways until that time to assure ubiquitous access.  Our school currently employs MacBook carts at a ratio of 2.5 students to one computer.  60 of these machines will be available for checkout from our Media Center in the fall.  Our Media Center/Library will also be open well beyond school hours.  It isn’t perfect, but it is allowing us to move ahead intelligently.  We are moving quickly toward the 1:1 environment everyone knows is inevitable in schools.

Instructional model

So now you have innovation on the ground level, administrative support, and unfiltered access.  Be proud.  If you can honestly say this characterizes your school or school system, then you are in a very small but fortunate minority.  You work with smart, visionary people who know how to plan and have been doing so for some time now.  If your lone goal is to have students, teachers and administrators all gleefully pushing buttons and gazing at computer screens…  then your work here is done.  Congratulations.  However, if what you were wanting out of this nationwide technology push was something a bit more…  substantial, then you had better finish reading.

The fourth pillar of “instructional model” is more than a quick soundbyte allows.  I see three levels of this notion with increasing value as follows:  1) You have thought about and encouraged good instructional practices in your building/district.  2) You have a well-articulated plan for effective instructional practice that is building or districtwide.  3)  You have a true learner-centered instructional model in place in grades K-12 that credits the constructivist nature of human learning.

I am fortunate to say that though our district has awakened late to the call of real and purposeful transformation via educational technology, the toughest of our four pillars has already been built.  The final pillar of a student-centered constructivist model for instruction that is carefully stated, professionally-developed, supported, and supervised…  is in place.

As I stated earlier, we are looking up at some pretty tall challenges ahead of us.  Locally, we have unfiltered access to all of the content and interactivity the web affords.  We have pedagogical experts in district leadership positions who have put in place an ideal instructional model for the future.  We have a quickly multiplying group of administrators at both the district and building levels who are responding to the call of the digital world, and we are making plans to foster innovation and creativity in our classrooms.

I feel like I am at the foot of a mountain that a handful of good people have climbed…  20,000 feet below the summit, yet armed with the best climbing gear and support I can get my hands on.  Our immediate future should be interesting indeed.

Where are you?

So where does all of this leave you?  How many of these pillars have been already constructed around you?  What have you done to help in that construction?  What do you see as the greatest challenges in this mission?  What can I or others do to help?  Are there other pillars that you believe I have missed here?

This post was initially intended to be a part of “Leadership Day 2009“ as conceived by Scott McLeod.  I am posting it at 1:30am on July 13th instead of on July 12th.  This is not to shabby considering my two baby girls thought that since it is technically summer here…  it should feel like it today.

Artwork

Refocus

I’m certainly not the first person to utter that sentence in reference to the integration of modern technology into the world of education.  This was originally posted to our school’s professional learning network, Virtual Southside, here.

*Full size image linked in citation below.

Then what is it about?

Folks… our mission really isn’t about the “technology.” I think most of us are starting to come to that realization. I would love for you to weigh in on this assertion. I am becoming less and less fond of the “…if we’re gonna be the ‘technology school’…….” phrase. Are you?

To be honest, I never did want that. The reason we used the “technology” moniker is that: 1) it was largely “given” to us, and 2) it is familiar to all who hear it. As you know, familiarity can distort meaning. What we believe in is a move toward a student-centered, constructivist learning environment. The fact that we believe the best way to achieve this goal is through the integrated use of emerging 21st Century technologies… does not make us a “technology school.” A technology school is a school that is centered upon gadgets and tools. Some would say this is all “semantics.” I couldn’t disagree more vigorously.

Our goal as high school teachers is to deliver a relevant and rigorous curriculum laden with the concepts and facts of many different schools of knowledge… as well as (and perhaps most importantly) the processes of learning. “Technology” is not our curriculum. Nobody writes “use chalk here” in a curriculum guide, and mentioning any other technology will only date your work in about two years.  Technological tools are way to interact with said content and process… but they are only the curriculum itself in a scant few of our courses.

Honoring PD in this area for once

I never wanted us to “teach technology.” I have always wanted us to use modern and emerging technologies to access and extend our current curriculum. Are there times we need to directly teach the best uses of a tool? Yes, of course… but this is just the first tiny step.  The first waypoint in this mission is to ensure that we are collectively savvy as a faculty first.  Continuing to put laptops in the hands of kids, all the while skipping directly over the lead learners in the room is just…  wrong.  It is ineffective, irresponsible and wrong.  I’m so glad that we have a staff who believes in this important part of our mission.

Therefore, I would like to propose a new set of language about what we are doing as we move forth into year two of our initiative:

Really think about what this title says.

Finding our own way

I think the kids who have had the opportunity to interact with our cohort teachers this year are far more adept at accessing information and in finding creative new ways of demonstrating their learning than ever before. We have all absorbed that which we found most valuable throughout this first year. Our development should be allowed to be as close to the constructivist ideal we seek for the classroom.  Why wouldn’t we?  Some of us have even carried the torch directly into our classrooms at a very high level already. I have seen it with my own two eyes. The district “tech study committee” saw this as well in our classrooms in a recent walkthrough of our building.

With the coming summer of reflection and relaxed study, we will surely begin our second year far more prepared to bring this learning to our students in the classroom in a very regular and integrated way. What do you think?

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As author Brenda Dyck puts it in this article, the goal of teachers in technology integration should not be on the tool, but rather what the tool can do for you.  I wholeheartedly agree with this goal in essence.  She next states that:  “The effectiveness of technology is watered down when laptops are used solely for basic word processing, haphazard surfing, or creating jazzed-up PowerPoint presentations.”  Again, I couldn’t agree more.

The rub comes when she begins discussion of how teachers might get to the “mind meat” as she relays it from technology writer Jamie McKenzie.  She then proceeds to describe a model project called “Fluttering Butterflies”, wherein students use, of all things, wait for it…    a word processor to “keep logs in which they documented their observations about classroom butterflies”.  As I said above, I agree that glitz means nothing without substance.  However, when kids are being asked to watch butterflies there is no compelling reason I can see to go to all the trouble of pulling out computers.  This is a task far better suited to a paper & pencil “science notebook” or the like.  After all, the vast majority of working scientists today (who are the only folks getting paid to peek in at butterflies) still scribble notes in a journal.  This allows true scribbling, diagrams, schematics and other non-linguistic representations.  Relevance is key to education in the 21st Century.

She spoke of this activity providing a platform for kids to hone observation skills as well as fostering meaning making.  I agree that such an activity does just that.  In fact, as a classroom teacher of both zoology and marine biology, I have students conduct quite similar activities at the high school level.  However, as a teacher who not only has the benefit of 32 wireless laptops at his disposal, but is also being paid as an instructional coach to bring our building up to speed in terms of technology integration, I wouldn’t think of dragging out laptops for such an event.  This would only be cumbersome at best.

It would have been nice to see the actual site for the butterfly project, but as of publish time for this post, Fluttering Butterflies is no longer an active link.  Big surprise for an article written six years ago in 2002.

A 2005 interview with Susan Patrick on the National Educational Technology Plan taught me that our government has at least the philosophical tools to support the curricular transformation of our schools. What strikes me as odd is the fact that I am just now reading the NETP for the first time. I hope to explain a bit about why I think this is odd in my particular instance. Though the article is now three years old, it contains more than enough fuel for action even to this day. Speaking from a Midwestern school district near the geographical center of our country, I can say that the number of people I could find tomorrow who have even read this now-aging document would be frighteningly small.

Still, what concerns me even more is the fact that our current national administration seems to be quite good at marketing when it wants to. There are a million examples evident if only in snapshots of our boss speaking. It is so common to be hit over the head with messages that we are expected to see as important that this strategy is frequently spoofed on the web. If kickoff speeches warrant this much attention to detail in crafting a message we can all swallow, surely those in the Department of Education could do a little more to push this very solid piece of work (NETP) to the forefront. Perhaps I am making the silly assumption that all branches of our current governmental tree are similar in girth.

For the past year or so, I have been relying on the NETS from the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). This framework sets out technology proficiency standards for students, teachers and administrators. I have long enjoyed looks on the faces of teachers when they first get a look at these standards. In my little corner of the world, it is pretty standard for high school teachers to have little technological proficiency.

It is almost an accepted joke to hear teachers throw out the, “I’m so technologically illiterate” line. You really can hear laughter about that one. I wonder why it isn’t acceptable to hear statements from math teachers like, “I am so arithmetically illiterate.” Or perhaps just simple comments from any teacher along the lines of, “Wow- I know little to nothing about sound instructional strategies.” I doubt those comments would garner much laughter in an even remotely professional setting. And yet- the one that has always, and in many circles still is acceptable, is the one about technological literacy. I was certainly influenced by one of Karl Fisch’s award-winning blog posts from this past September entitled: “Is It Okay To Be A Technologically Illiterate Teacher?”

I know it’s not okay. I know that adding technology to the lives of teachers is not generally a positive thing for kids. In fact, it is usually a negative when it negatively impact the morale of their teachers. I know that it is better when teachers are integrating technology into their lessons by informed self-choice. What I believe in most of all is an approach that blends technology and best practices in constructivist theory, thereby transforming the curriculum into something that approximates the needs of our students graduating today.

So what we have at hand today is a document released by the U.S. Department of Education in 2004, that sits on a website at ed.gov. We have a continually-revised set of technology proficiency standards (NETS) that move with the times and are unveiled anew at NECC conferences. We also have teachers and technology specialists like Karl Fisch and others who are beginning to make this happen on the ground floor through grassroots efforts and the blood and sweat of the many inspired teachers they influence.

In my opinion, there is only one way we will successfully transform the national high school curriculum. I’d rather not go on any further about who might be able to accomplish this feat. Isn’t it obvious who is getting this done?