Finding Purpose in and
Have you ever been to one of those bathrooms - I’ve mostly seen them in Asia - where the toilet has all kinds of buttons, plastic wrap, and pretty much looks like it could fly you into space? As you gaze at it (bladder full to exploding) do you leave the bathroom in search of a trainer? Wonder to yourself why you didn’t get any PD for this sort of thing? Refuse to use it? My guess is you just figure out how it works. How? By pushing the buttons and exploring the machine.
Something has happened to us that has dulled our interest in exploring the technologies we encounter and to figure out how they work. Maybe it’s because our technologies these days are all in black boxes full of wires and parts we don’t understand and we can’t easily figure out how they work. Maybe because when we have tried to do that, we’ve crashed a system and it has left us emotionally scarred. Maybe, like the fancy toilet, we just don’t have a sense of urgency and purpose to using new technologies.
So let’s think about urgency. Why should we be in a hurry to get technologies into the classroom? Well, let’s start with the ubiquity of technology in our students’ lives. They’re surrounded by it and in their lifetimes will have to constantly adapt to changing devices. We do them a disservice if we don’t model putting
technology to work for us in meaningful ways, always looking for the best tool for the job. All of this change also means our students need to learn to manage themselves digitally. Blogging at school means practice with appropriate use, language, and perhaps most importantly, commenting. This scaffolded learning environment teaches them how to engage in meaningful conversation in social media in a setting where mistakes can be learning opportunities instead of humbling catastrophes.
We need to be there to help our students slow down and filter out the constant distraction that so many technologies cause. If we completely cut ourselves off from the noise, we don’t learn how to manage it. Our students need to figure out how to feel the vibration of their phones and still complete the task at hand.
What about purpose? What could technology possibly do to improve learning in our classrooms? When I use Google Docs with my students, they share their work with their classmates and review and comment. I then review and comment as well. When we worked on paper, we could do this, but the student would have to rewrite the whole paper because of the jumble of comments or worse, wait to turn in a finished product to get feedback. Writing drafts now means a supported and scaffolded effort with no repetitive re-writes. But why stop with just replicating the learning experiences of the past? Technologies provide different tools to show what you know - students can easily make movies (WeVideo), design photo collages (Pixlr), build 3D models (123Design) and even interactive games (Scratch) to communicate their learning. The software is out there, web-based, device-independent, and easy to use.
Remember taking photographs with a camera and having to wait for your film to develop to know if you’d captured anything worth having? Remember how hard it was to learn to take a good photo with such a long delay between the learning experience and the feedback of the photograph? Now think of how quickly your own photo-taking skills have improved since you got that handy smartphone! Closing this feedback loop on learning experiences is exactly what technology supports for our students.
But the purpose isn’t just for our students. Truly integrating technology into our classrooms means we get better feedback as teachers. We can do exit tickets in Google forms and know instantly where we need to adjust our lesson plans. We can make gradebooks in spreadsheets that have coloured heat maps on grades, immediately making obvious who we need to scaffold and who is ready to move on. By having our students make videos explaining their learning, we can gain insight into their understandings that might have been lost in their fledgling writing.
So we get that maybe there is a reason to do it. But how do we get there? How do we pull new technologies into the classroom without losing tactile learning experiences? How do we, ourselves, find enough confidence to bring these unknown entities into the room? We need to become more technological ourselves. We need to step out of our comfort zones and push a few buttons. We need to look for help in our peers, on the internet, and at conferences. We need to let our students teach us the technologies they know or even choose the ones they want to learn more about.
We also don’t have to lose out on tactile learning experiences - engineering challenges use technologies like small motors, switches, wires, batteries and duct tape. They’re tangible and physical and yet offer wonderful learning experiences in computational thinking, collaboration, and agile design. Game design can be on a platform like Scratch, but you can also design board games - pieces can be created in 123Design and printed on a 3D printer, giving students a truly integrated tactile-digital experience.
Technologies don’t replace teachers. Pencils, pens, projectors, and printers are all technologies and yet we still have jobs. Technology is just a fancy word for tools. Our goal is learning and in order to do that, we need to find the right tools for the job and to not be afraid to use them. We need to look at new technologies just like I looked at that toilet in Asia - with a sense of urgency and purpose.
Truly integrating technology into our classrooms means we get better feedback as teachers.
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By Sarah Woods
Urgency for New Technologies