Time to ditch the outdated computer lab and use the technology in students' pockets.

When we started the conversation about technology integration into classrooms in 1990, %15 of homes in the US had a computer and by 1994, %2 had internet access.

Compare this to 2008, when close to %80 of the households in the US had internet access and broadband penetration across the country had reached %90 by the start of 2009.

There has been so much change in technology and particularly, in our access to it, yet the conversation about classroom integration seems to have changed relatively little. Whereas, in the 90's, it may have made sense for schools to try to add the role of teacher-of-technology to their other responsibilities, in the rush to get equipped, schools only found themselves in a losing battle. They could neither find sufficient funding for the equipment, nor adequate time for the training to use it.

And yet, today, this approach persists with the result that schools sink money into what has become a parallel (and rapidly outdated) system of access - in the form of computer labs, clunky peripherals, and endless software upgrades. This approach has never worked well, except possibly for the richest schools, but to add insult to injury, students now prefer their personal, sleeker and more functional portable technologies anyway.

%70 of students carry a cell-phone, and most of these have video, photo, internet and (arguably limited) word-processing capabilities. In 2005, a study on ergoweb pointed-out that cell phones "have a big advantage over lap top computers in the classroom because they are cheaper, more portable and almost as sophisticated. Using camera phones, students develop their literacy by capturing images, writing about them, and emailing the work to friends, families and teachers."

Dr Elizabeth Hartnell-Young has done extensive research on the topic of mobile computing - as it has evolved with cell phones. She has made a few examples available on a PDF called Mobile Phones for Learning.

Powerful and inspiring technologies are walking into class in students' pockets, and yet we still discuss integration as thought the first step were to plug it into students' desks and hire someone to teach the teacher how to use it. At the same time (and the same schools) there is a great deal of chatter about how to prize portable technology out of students' hands so that they can 'focus on learning'. Perhaps we have this backwards. The Ergoweb study reports, "The principal of one participating school had been looking for something to excite disengaged students, and has been "overwhelmed by the resulting enthusiasm" when projects incorporated cell phones."

When schools began investing in technology, we could not have dreamed of a world where classrooms didn't need desktop computers; where students carried powerful mobile devices, with a wireless connection to some super-cool thing call the internet - in their pockets. As if that weren't fantastic enough, the news gets better: enter, wireless cloud computing, a wonderful thing for schools (and organizations large and small). No more need of expensive servers, upgrades or technical support people to run it all (and make us feel foolishly ignorant). Almost anything we need -storage, software, networking - its all online, and much of it Open Source.

We have arrived at an emancipating new age for learning. When we embrace it, not only will students learn better, be happier and more engaged, but schools will even save money.

Sinking or Sailing - an outsider's perspective on classroom culture

Maybe its pretty clear from my posts that I am not a classroom teacher. I have a much easier job as a sort of science interventionist: I get called in to give half-day (activity-filled) classes in science. I see all kinds of different classrooms, and sadly, don't ever get to know the students or the teachers.

But I get an interesting overview and I wasn't surprised to hear from Bill Gates on TED that the teacher makes the greatest difference for a student - often the difference between staying in school or dropping out. Don't we all know this by now?

What I might not have realized is how amazingly easy it is to see, within moments of entering a classroom, whether the ship is sailing or sinking. In a class that is productive, safe and even fun, the teacher is punctual, clean and dresses as though she cares. The kids file into their ordered and uncluttered classroom space without reluctance. Most of all, teachers and students are clearly in it together and share an almost conspiratorial eagerness that glints in their eyes. I can feel the good times and the challenges overcome, and I sense the bonding that occurred in this atmosphere of mutual support. By contrast, the classroom that is adversarial, unhappy and unproductive is as easy to pick-out as if their were a sign on the door: DO NOT ENTER

As I write this, I hear tired teacher voices in my head - people who have been pushed to the limit and beyond by a system that asks far too much of them. I DO know. I DO. But I also have to believe that at least to SOME extent, the difference between the sinking or sailing ship is a choice - or a series of choices. As hard as it might be, especially at first, it has to be much better for ALL - teacher included - to choose success. Its not that I honestly believe anyone would CHOOSE failure. I imagine it must feel more like a slow incremental giving-up, or perhaps giving-in to the temptation to let the small stuff slide. Let the mess pile up, wear the dirty old t-shirt, and back down from that impudent little tween instead of holding your ground. I can see doing all of these things in the "short term", until one day, a teacher finds herself in a job not worth waking-up for, entering a classroom she hates. Imagine how her students feel.

PowerPointless, Not!

What a fantastic talk on TED. One thing that I have noticed, watching TED, is that few speakers have very compelling slides to compliment their presentations...this talk by Scott McCloud is an exception, in the extreme. He is animated and articulate and passionate, AND his slides compliment his points with a simple elegance that is so rare.

How to Give Good Presentations: one of the most popular 'talks' that I give, because it is so important to present well, and yet creating the great presentation is so elusive. Like many others, I have been frustrated by the effect of PowerPoint on presenting in general, while at the same time, fascinated and thrilled by the possibilities that it offers...adding video, sound, images, animations. Why describe anything anymore, when you can google a great image of it to throw on a slide?

Well, I wouldn't say don't google the image. "A picture is worth...etc." The image is important, but the presenter is MORE important. Maybe the reason that we don't grasp this is insecurity - we sell ourselves short. We spend a lot of time connecting through this medium (I sit alone in my house as I type), and less time appreciating and cultivating the eye-to-eye and face-to-face connection - so maybe we forget (or never learn) how powerful it is.

Or maybe, we have bought the Hollywood fallacy that a person worth watching must be beautiful. No. She must be human, genuine, and believe in herself.

At a concert last month, I was moved almost to tears by music that I have heard on my stereo a thousand times. This shocked me because I don't see enough live music, and also because I had forgotten the power of the face-to-face. It can be magical.

A good presenter - someone who stands before her audience and feels respect for them, even love for them in their willingness to sit passively and listen - will have a very powerful impact WITH HER WORDS ALONE. PowerPoint can certainly illustrate your point. A clever animation, carefully timed to your words can be a distraction, but can also pound your point home in a way that leaves your audience breathless. But don't, DON'T turn the lights down while you are speaking! Your audience needs to see you, to look into your eyes and see your passion. That is the best way to make them feel it, learn it, and want to know more.

Formally recognizing students' tech expertise is a win-win

While many schools may not have changed because of technology integration, I would argue that students certainly have. Teachers remain the subject-area expert in the classroom, as it should be, but their students are now the technology experts. Teachers can not, and should not even try, to catch-up.
The only successful way to teach in a tech-integrated classroom (and with students carrying their own powerful, personal tech in their pockets - there is no longer any such thing as a tech-free class), is to approach learning as a collaborative adventure where all participants learn (teacher included) and all participate in teaching and supporting learning. This means teachers are allowed to say, "I don't know" and students who teach the teacher are rewarded with gratitude at least, possibly even with formal credit. The best teachers have always taught this way.

One change that I would suggest for schools is to pour less $$ into teacher tech PD, and to formalize the support role that students can (and already do) hold. Create a formal structure for students teaching each other, teaching teachers, and even providing trouble-shooting tech support. Students who will use the expensive tools should be charged with testing them to ensure a good investment. The plain truth is, that the students are better qualified to judge this than a hurried, harried teacher.

Some schools already have student tech support teams. I have seen students who might normally get lost academically, find meaning and purpose in school for the first time. The bonus is that teachers in these schools can focus their energies on their subjects, and stop feeling as though they are running a race that they can’t hope to win.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

We can't expect our children to know that there are multiple paths to success and happiness, but we adults surely know it, don't we? A 14-year-old friend recently sat down with me to talk about the possibility of becoming a biologist. She asked, "How do I know if that's what I want?" For a 14, 16, 18, even for a 20-year-old, there can surely be only one answer to that question: "you don't know, you can't know, none of us knows."

Yet, schools persist in teaching children that there is only one path to success and happiness, and one career to choose that represents the "right" choice for them. More important, children are encouraged in the belief that they must choose as early as grade 9 and that their future success depends on it.

By the stricken look on this young person's face, I could tell that no amount of reassurance from me would ease her mind. People whom she trusts and respects to KNOW have convinced her that she should be able to choose. At first, her natural conclusion was that there must be something wrong - WITH HER. It did not occur to her to question the "wisdom" of her teachers.

A few days ago, I asked how the decision-making was going. My young friend gave me a confident smile and announced that she had made her choice. In being forced to choose a path, she had been taught an important lesson...

As far as her school is concerned, what she actually might want to do with her life is not so important as having an impressive answer to that question, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" For a while, at least until she figures-out where her passions lie, my young friend will answer, "I want to be a lawyer." Oddly, that answer, from a 14-yr-old, seems to get a positive response.

Perhaps, one day, she will find herself in studying law, and maybe she will discover a true passion for justice. Or maybe, she will drop-out and go to art school, wondering what ever made her choose law in the first place.

Classrooms full of experts: the teacher-centred teacher's nightmare

We are conditioned to believe that the mode of learning in our classrooms should involve a very high degree of control on the part of the teacher. Maybe thats why we persist in trying to integrate technology into the teacher-centred classroom by replacing her with a computer (see Chicago's VOISE academy).

Since we first started having serious discussions about "technology integration", we have looked for ways to replace the teacher with some form of virtual instruction. I was a willing and eager participant in the search for an integration formula at a Canadian University in the early 90's. First, we tried whole-course multimedia development - even great teachers, people with an exceptional rapport with their students, pulled themselves out of the classroom to create multimedia courseware.
Months or frustration (climbing steep learning curves), and many thousands of dollars later, we found that modules did not hold students’ attention and that student performance declined. More tellingly, students who had been expected to love the new medium, felt shortchanged - they had wanted the great teacher, not some digital facsimile.

Amazingly, the conclusion of our school and many others was not to abandon multimedia courseware but to hire dedicated (and expensive) artists and programmers with the expertise to build more attractive and interactive courseware (much of which turned-out to lack the substance that would have been injected by the subject-matter expert). We were not alone. Large US companies, betting on predictions from big names that elearning would make huge profits, lost millions of dollars developing multimedia that wouldn't sell (Tony Bates, 2005).

One of the reasons why coureware didn't work is that it often came from one of 2 flawed sources: 1. companies who put it in the hands of designers and programmers who made it pretty and functional but very light on content OR 2. post secondary institutions and other groups with subject-area expertise who created content-rich product that gave little or no consideration to the teachers and their curriculum. As someone who spent up to 10 days designing an individual screen on a CD ROM (to be viewed by the user for 2 seconds or less - what is the educational value in that?), I can say that development costs were often underestimated in these multimedia projects as well.

In the late 90s, laptop programs began to pop-up around North America. At Acadia University, Canada's first post-secondary laptop school, the program exploded onto campus with 4,000 notebooks; 928 online courses; 215,000 online e-discussion groups by 2002. The response to mandatory integration by the terrified faculty? Powerpoint mania, and the subsequent revelation of "powerpointlessness": after spending countless hours converting lectures into PowerPoint, students only learned LESS, and grew more discontented (and were thankful for the escape offered by ICQ).

Still searching for the ideal digital prof, we grasped at the promise of learning objects (LO). Many believed they offered the best possible approach to developing support material for the classroom. Still used often, learning objects can be woven seamlessly into a great learning experience and can harness multimedia to illustrate a concept very compellingly. On the other hand, LO's can be little more than a TV ad, selling concepts rather than constructing understanding. At worst, they are little more than a powerful and very effective means of communicating the developer's bias.

Of course there are great examples of PowerPoint use, of Learning Objects and even of modules and courseware but in all of the successful examples, there IS no formula. They vary hugely for one another and for every success, there are many apparent "failures" that look superficially identical...except for 2 things:
1. the successes all started from the question of how to improve learning, period.
2. they are all student-centred.

So much of the search for a 'formula' has been about supporting, facilitating and injecting technology into the traditional teacher-controlled classroom...which doesn't work.

For the first time in history, teachers (who are brave enough to integrate technology into their teaching) are facing classrooms full of experts. So, for the first time, "student-centred" is not just another teaching strategy, it is the only strategy.

Oust the petty kings and queens from our classrooms

Looking for a small corner of the world to reign over? Please don't go into teaching.

So many who lack power elsewhere in their lives are mistakenly drawn back to the classroom. Maybe they picture it as a place where they can close the door and dominate willing and compliant young people.

But we all know that doesn't work out...not for the young people, and not for the insecure adult either. She ends-up hiding in the staff room, complaining to anyone who will listen about "kids these days". Miserable, she runs her classroom unsmilingly and with a false authority that garners little respect.

Sadly, The Insecure Controller is not alone in her school - she will always have peers who share her approach. These miserable teachers are rightly despised by their students whose derision fills the halls between classes with a palpable frustration tinged with fear.

Controllers fear creativity and change, and are so inflexible that their curriculum remains constant across years, sometimes even whole generations of students. The longer they teach, the more miserable they become, and the less likely they are to step outside the protective walls of the school to try any other profession.

We have all known a teacher like this...we dismiss him from our life come June. But what damage has he done, really? He may be powerless to inspire curiosity or respect, but even if he leaves only the faintest sour taste in a student's mouth...he can change the course of a life. And he should not be tolerated.

"Student-centered" is the only choice in the wired classroom

I was at a conference about effective use of technology in the post secondary classroom. Since I was teaching at a university where every student had a laptop, I was keen to attend a session on classroom management in a wired school. The presenters were from a college in the states that had a "laptop program" (students were required to purchase a laptop as part of their tuition) and they had been struggling with ICQ - the instant messaging software of choice at that time. Their faculty were clinging to the traditional lecture-style and it wasn't working - students were just ignoring them and chatting online. I hoped to hear about some innovative teaching.

To prevent students from messaging one another, they had placed mirrors all around the walls of one classroom and then positioned the students facing away from the instructor. The students could see him in the mirrors, and he could keep an eye on their computer screens while he lectured at them.

I also visited an elementary school in Maine shortly after their Maine Learning Technology Initiative had been launched - putting a laptop into the hands of every student. In this grade 7 classroom, the teacher was not working nearly so hard to maintain CONTROL - no mirrors. She was working with her students on a problem that involved some internet research, and her students were enthralled by their beautiful new iMacs. In fact, the students were working with each other while the teacher circulated, helping-out.

What seems so brilliant to me about technology in the classroom is not that computers themselves are so powerful, or even that they provide the teacher with so many more options for teaching (although they certainly do). A computer in the student's hands gives her a window outside the very narrow possibilities of the dull classroom. And to escape through that window, she needs a certain set of skills - an ability to solve the hundreds of problems that arise from even simple computing. In those students in Maine, I saw energy and enthusiasm...they had been entrusted with some real power over their own experience.

Choosing to take a student-centered approach to teaching used to be up to the teacher. Arguably, a teacher-centered approach has never really resulted in effective learning, but it might have looked effective - once. In the wired classroom, it is all the more obvious that students don't learn well from "the sage on the stage". In the wired classroom, student-centered is the only way.

Born creative

We are born creative and curious, but schooling soon changes that.

Babies are wired to explore with every sense, learning at a rate that is beyond measure. Toddlers devour the world, feeling, smelling and tasting with gusto - by 2 years old, they are expert learners. By age 4, children are brimming with questions - not just feeling and testing thier way but also stretching their limited vocabulary to ask about anything and everything.

The chaos of the JK classroom is proof that childrens' creative hunger is still driving them hard when we first expel them into the public school system. But 20-30 individuals sharing one small space and one teacher is too many, so that teacher is forced to preserve her sanity by immediately imposing order in whatever way she can. We teachers curb enthusiasm and quell excitement. Students are disappointed to have got the wrong idea about learning...what they thought would be fun actually happens in an uncomfortable chair, under stark lighting, pencil in hand. Learning quickly transforms from energetic, thrilling and colourful to silent, solitary and dull.

And children are rewarded for staying quiet, doing as they are told, and passively taking information in rather than seeking it out on their own. These children take pleasure in the positive reinforcement, but when there is no pleasure in learning, the pat on the head becomes their only motivator.

What does a successful preschooler look like? She is boysterous and loud, hurling herself into new arenas with curiosity and confidence. By grade 2, success starts to look very different.

A grade 2 student who earns her teacher's praise is quiet, waits for permission before showing interest and does as she is told without pausing to question. Sometimes, students awaken from this school-induced stupour sometime in highschool, and drop out.

The rest, the so-called "cream of the crop", heard off to university still believing that if you do as you are told and wait passively for the lecture to begin, success will somehow follow. Time to wake up, I think. Better still, time to stop puting them to sleep in the first place.