Technology Integration

This week I spent a day with the 6th graders. I’ve been working all year with this group of students but with a science teacher. Today, their Language Arts teacher wanted me to show them how to use Inspiration to help them plan their writing piece about their career study.  These students were right on task. I was really pleased to see how well the listened and how well they organized their work.  When they put their ideas together in Inspiration and saw that their outline was done for them, including the notes they could add, they were hooked. It was a new program for them. 

This program isn’t in their docs, so I had to help two or three in each class find it. Some are still struggling to find things, and I think there will always be those. Overall, 95% of them get it.

At first, students were taken by the Inspiration icons, wanting to choose just the right one. Eventually, after the first group, I learned that this was a distraction from the lesson and that organization of ideas needed to be the focus. Between the first lesson and the second (one afternoon to the next morning), their teacher emailed me her Inspiration model. We put that up on the screen. While she talked about it, I clicked through it. Good experience team teaching, especially today. I’m reminded about the recent experience with Canvastic. As a graphic organizer, Inspiration is extremely powerful since it gives students the visual cues about their thought process prior to writing. I wish I had had this when I was in the 6th grade: outlining was never much fun for me !

I can’t wait to see how well these 6th graders will be doing with their one to one laptop program as they enter 7th grade next fall. They’re already far ahead of this year’s 7th graders and this year’s 7th graders are far ahead of this year’s 8th.

A group of 2nd graders came into their classroom to find me and my computer screen projected on the wall. We were looking at an interactive physics web site on projectile motion.
You wouldn’t think that second graders would be interested in this on the surface, but these students took turns figuring out how to point the cannon so that the projectile would hit the target. I grouped them into boys on one side, and girls on the other. Each group member had a turn until the group “hit the target.”
There was a lot of reasoning happening here….. there was some guessing, too, and some students had fun, but the most amazing thing was their levels of engagement. They were really competing, and, I think, learning as well.
But who would have thought that second graders could grasp projectile motion?
This was a lesson with just the instructor’s laptop, a projector, a screen, the web resource, and a great group of kids.

Most teachers aren’t nearly as fortunate as I have been. They have a few laptops available, maybe one or two desktops in their classrooms. Not many have a mobile lab of 20-30 laptops with Internet access available to them…but they really should, you know.
What to do when there isn’t one to one? Two weeks ago, I stopped into the local market on my way to school and bought two large packages of M&M’s. I grabbed a few paper plates, and headed to the 4th grade classroom for a lesson. The teacher had no idea what I was going to do, and in fact had emailed me a web site to have them “look at,” but that was something she didn’t need me for really.
I separated the class into five groups, each of three or four students. Each group had a sorter, and there were one or three laptops per group. You can guess the rest.
The M&M’s were divided up roughly among the groups. Each sorter counted out the number and the colors. Each group created a spread sheet enumerating the colors and the amount for each, using a fill across and fill down formula to create the total for all.
They then experimented with graphs. We use Numbers, a part of iWork, Apple’s ‘answer’ to Excel, and did some neat things with pie charts, pulling the segments apart, copying and pasting into Keynote and Pages for practice.
At the end of the class, I summarized the exercise by adding the group totals together into one spreadsheet. We drew some conclusions.
The purpose of the lesson was have experience with the software, understand some terms such as mode, mean, median and range which they had been working on the week before, and just to interact with the technology as a different way of learning.
The kids did great…..didn’t lose a single piece of chocolate! (who would want to pop one of those into the mouth after having been handled by so many folks?) And I think we got the idea of how to make a spreadsheet, too.

This noon a 4th grade teacher asked me if she could “send” to all the laptops the URL of the page I wanted students to access. I asked her, “Why not put them on your web page? Then the learning doesn’t have to stop after the bus leaves the school yard” “No,” she replied, ” I don’t have a web page, but I need to learn how to make one.
“They’ll just have to type the addresses in, ” she said.

Of course that’s a complete waste of time. Technology has come so far, and it’s so very easy for our teachers to add to their web pages, that there’s little reason why students need to do more than to click on links and to remember where on the page the links are.

This morning a 6th grade science teacher met with me to finish up planning for our two-three week session in the lab. The plans revolved around increasing student understanding of cell structure, both animals and plants. I never had biology, so this was all new to me and pretty neat stuff besides.
We had planned the time to create a Keynote presentation. Students knew already how to grab full size images, add them to their home directories, and later add them to their slides. So there was no real learning curve here.
Last year I found a neat cell drawing on the floor of the hallway, and thought what a great idea….use a drawing program to create the student’s version of the cell structure.
Shortly before, I had added a new drawing program, Canvastic, and this time, I thought, was perfect for introducing it to the teacher and these 6th graders.
So that’s what we did. At the end of 40 minutes (some classes are longer, none shorter), several students had completed the animal cell drawing. It was great to see them learn the software so quickly. I’ve always believed that putting the software in front of the students was never a risky act.
The premise I’ve had was that students remember more whenever they are asked to complete more challenging tasks on the road to a presentation, or finale, of an assignment, and learning this new software program was one way to do it.
Students were engaged and learning as they went back and forth between the diagram on the web page and the drawing they were creating.
This process seems to be successful; but I’m nagged a bit with this question: Isn’t this more like substitution? Isn’t this process more like writing a paper and then coming to the computer lab “to use technology” to type the paper? Students didn’t draw their cells before coming to the lab, but they were copying what they saw.
Anyone have thoughts about this?

I’ve struggled with this for so long; so now I discover a new trick. Encouragement by students !

When I’ve had a chance to be in a teacher’s classroom, I take the opportunity to ask the students a few questions. Usually, after a particularly exciting web site or project, I ask them “How many of you are on line at home?” And even in the rural, not real wealthy area of Central Maine, I see 95% of the hands go up. “That’s great,” I say. “So when you go home and Mom asks you what you did in school today, you can say,’Let’s go to my teacher’s web page, and I can show you!’” Usually the teacher grimaces a bit at that comment, but wait…there’s more. Next, I say, “How many of you spend your weekends or time at different houses, like at Dad’s or at Mom’s?” Sadly, about 1/3 of the hands go up. “Well,” I tell them, “Then you can show Mom or Dad what you’re doing in school by just going to your teacher’s web page.” By now I’m getting some cooler looks from the teacher, as she doesn’t have a web page.

I’m not looking to embarrass the teacher, but I am looking to put pressure on him/her to create that web page. To have a parent call and say, “Where’s your web page, I couldn’t find it?”

Meanwhile, don’t think that teachers don’t have support to make one. I’m giving three after school sessions a week, an hour long each, through the middle of December for several technology related topics. Two of those sessions each week are “Creating and managing your web page.” And the sessions have all filled…..three days after the announcement went out via email. I’m amazed at that. I started this practice last year, in January, and had a fair turnout, but this year the principals excused the teachers from their Core Team daily meetings to attend. I don’t know if these participants were pulled into my sessions or pushed into them, but it doesn’t matter because they’re there, and they’re mine for the hour. Teachers get contact hours for attending, and if they make a classroom web page a goal and maintain it weekly, they’ll get one entire credit for it. It’s nice to have the administrative support for this endeavor.

I’m keeping it simple for making web pages. We use FirstClass here, and I installed Home Page Construction Kit. This add-on provides some pretty simple templates for making pages with buttons, nav bars, and all that stuff. I wouldn’t use Dreamweaver or GoLive as those are pretty complicated. It’s not about the software…it’s all about making a web page. Gone are the days of WebWeaver on OS 7.5; but there’s nothing the matter wtih Google Pages or with PortaPortal for a teacher’s web page. As long as they have one, and it’s updated, it’s the goal I’m shooting for.

Technological,Pedagogical, Content Knowledge  (ISBN 0-8058-6356-7) by AACTE

 This book is amazing. One of the contributors, Judi Harris, is a familiar name to technology and education. Although it’s expensive, all integrationists should read it. This book contains cogent descriptions of what I’ve observed about how teachers interact with technology. A perception that there are different cultures between teachers and technologists, the “wicked problem” of technology, the “protean” nature+functionally opaqueness+instability of technology are some of the ideas discussed in the introduction. I’m struck by “Technology is often considered to be somebody else’s problem;” hence, part of the reason for the split. The idea of two cultures living together like artists and scientists, brings to mind how our teachers may perceive technologists. But I’m far from a scientist, and I would tell them that I’m more like an artist, selecting and manipulating the best tools for the sculpture at hand.  In reading about “wicked problems,” I’m seeing my own experiences with technology integration issues both in labs and in classrooms. It is the complexity of the variables that makes this profession such a wonderful challenge. Add to that, the perspectives all the technology users bring to the interface, and there’s certainly a spiral of complexity taking place. I reflect on how often I like to observe just how students are interacting with the technology as I try to figure out how to make the lesson(s) meaningful to them. It’s amazing to see how students bring such different interactions with technologies. I’m always asking them, “how did you do that?” as I learn along side them. The fluency of information technology (FIT) requires “information processing, communication, and problem-solving” as part of a more modern definition of computer literacy (p. 15). What is interesting here is that this definition is “evolving.” Historically, educators have been used to static knowledge, or knowledge that does not expand exponentially.

I work as the technology integrationist in a rural K-8 school in central Maine. Last summer the school purchased a new laptop cart with 26 MacBooks just for the second floor of the elementary school….that’s Grades 2-4.

I love working with all ages, but today’s 3rd grade lesson on Keynote was amazing. These 10 year olds stunned their teacher with their presentations we made in under an hour. I come to the classes once a week to help teachers learn the tools. The week before, we had saved full size images from a Google image search to our iPhoto libraries. This week, we added the photos through the media browser to a blank Keynote presentation. And some were wanting to add their narrations, too. We added transitions. The students didn’t know what transitions were, but when I showed them the difference between the presentation I had made with and without, they caught on right away. Didn’t they have fun with this. They were much better listeners today, and we accomplished so much.

What I take away from these sessions is from the energy and excitement these kids have. And that energy has prompted me to resume my blogging.

When I did this same exercise with a fourth grade teacher earlier in the week, the teacher decided to have her students use Keynote to demonstrate what they had learned about some subject or another. And with a 6th grade teacher yesterday, I’m now booked with his class to demonstrate the rudiments of presentations. We start off with a limited search, and then we go on to add the photos, full size images. Then on to making the presentation.

One comment the teacher made that has stayed with me was “I’m on overload right now, and won’t be able to remember all of this.” But to that I said, “You have 18 possible teachers in this room right now, so don’t hesitate to ask if any of them know how to do >>>>>>.” This is what I love about the technology. It has enabled students to be teachers and teachers to be students as we discover a need to share the learning and the classroom and switch the locus of control to the learner.

Powerful stuff, technology is.

A wicked problem is defined as one with a complex solution, and that the solution itself will probably open up more problems to tackle as the solver works through the original problem. The variables make the solution very hard to figure out; add to that the changing nature of technology, and you’ve got a “wicked good wicked problem.” “Wicked Good” is a common oxymoronic expression here in Maine.

This in itself is enough of a brick wall to send teachers back to their foxholes and prevent them from using technology on their own, and gets in the way of schools moving forward.

Many folks will say no to this question. I’ve just finished a section of TPCK. In 2003, there was a study by Heeter that compared educational and commercial computer games. That study found that educational games were “easier to learn, less complex, shorter, less challenging to play….” This resulted in a need by the school to bring the games within a certain time slot schools had available. The authors of the study concluded that computer games for schools were schizophrenic as content learning and fun had to be significant components. All one has to do is to go to brainpop.com and check out their “lessons.”

So if complex computer games that result in higher learning don’t fit the school environment, maybe that environment needs to be modified. Hmmm, don’t think that will happen any time soon, but what we can do is to provide ‘after school’ time and ‘before school’ time for students to interact with more complex technologies with adult supervision. Now, that would be interesting !