Activities, Activities....too many Activities

Many of us went through our training as teachers in a time before there were standards, in a time when curriculum documents sat on shelves in our classrooms if they were there and available at all. It was during that time that we learned to create well designed activities. You know what I mean...that "fun" apple unit that you did in the Fall where you pulled together all sorts of activities - the apple poems, the apple songs, the apple art projects. All of that kept our students very busy doing lots of "stuff" but, what about the learning?

Sitting in a meeting this afternoon I was reminded that we haven't quite broken out of this model even while lots of other things have been changing around us - the development of curriculum documents, training teachers to construct well designed lessons, the plans that brought technology into our classrooms to name a few. There were stories being shared today of students using computers to access a website provided by our reading series that contains a set of...you guessed it...activities. There were recountings of literature circle activities that culminated in....you guessed it...another activity. And I began to wonder, with all that we know about the brain and learning, why we can't break out of that mindset.

It's hard work to teach students to think. You have to lay lots of groundwork before students can independently use thinking skills. It takes modeling, practice and time. Unfortunately, this is what we so often overlook or skim over thinking that all we have to do it "show" our students what to do or give them some sort of activity to do and they'll automatically be able to do it.

To use technology to support learning takes lots of modeling, practice and time but instead we're letting ourselves rely on activities provided by websites that involve no real learning whatsoever. Several teachers have been talking about how they set up stations during their literacy time and they tell me about the great activities that our reading series provides for students online. Finally, while other discussions went forward, I logged onto a computer and got into the website to really take a close look at what's going on there. Having heard the claim that "our students need to practice these skills to get better" from so many teachers I was hoping that what I would see would prove to be worthwhile. But no...just a lot of activities. It goes something like this...Read/listen to the directions, go to the first example, choose the answer and move on to the next example and - oh, yeah - no feedback about wrong answers and you get to see how many points you earned at the end. If you're not truly invested in actually reading the material and thinking about the choices all you have to do is click on each possible answer until you got moved on to the next example. I'd wager that the brightest students invest a little time in looking for the right answer the first time - but then again, the brightest students probably don't need this type of rote activity. And, as for those who struggle with reading - is this kind of thing really going to help them be better readers?

A few weeks back, Jeff Utecht wrote about whether or not we really need standards for technology. I've thought about that quite a bit lately and my answer unequivocally is YES! We most certainly do need standards. If for nothing else than to keep these types of "activities" off the list of things our students can do during the instructional day. But even more than just having a list of standards, we need to have an understanding of how standards work and how they break down into specific benchmarks so that we can move into the realm of using technology less for activities and more for true learning experiences. Wikis, podcasts, blogs, VoiceThreads, SlideShares and the like are really cool - but, if it's not about the learning, if it's just an activity we teach our kids how to do, then it's just a waste of time.

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New Tools and the Use of Thinking Skills

Today,Wes Fryer shares his experiences in writing his doctoral thesis using web tools. So, with a little time on my hands I've given Jump Knowledge a try. Here's a sample: (scroll down a bit if you check this out)

Click here to view an annotation of Weblogg-ed

There are other tools that function similarly to Jump Knowledge. One of them is Diigo. I've been using Diigo for a while. I like that I can highlight whole chunks of text then annotate them. I also like that I can go back to my Diigo account to see the chunks with the annotations associated with them. You can then extract the highlights so that you print a page containing your highlighted chunks of text along with the annotations you made. I think this is perfect for student research and for bloggers as well as for creating conversations among groups that you create in Diigo.

Jump Knowledge, on the other hand, seems to only let you print the annotations alone. Without the text that the annotation refers to, I'm not sure how much I might use this tool. If I'm doing research I find it more beneficial to have the original text together with the annotations - for me, this helps to preserve the text and experience based connections that I found while reading.

As I think about writing this blog post, I think about how we use the power of technology for learning. The use of technology is most powerful when we can use the tools to gather and organize the information we need in order to apply thinking skills. While writing this posting, I've used my blog, my email, Jump Knowledge and Diigo but, in order to really improve my learning about these types of tools, I've also used (in this case a very limited) comparison, which is one of the most effective instructional strategies we can use with students and a skill that helps us to process information in order to retain that knowledge for long periods of time. So, it's not just about the tools - it's about the learning that the tools support and the instructional practices we use.

Reading to Learn

"I want my students to use the computers in a way that helps them learn," my teacher friend said to me this summer. "Great!" I said. "What do students need to learn in your classroom?"

So began a conversation about technology use in the classroom. This one, like many, led to exploring option together and working on what we thought might be a viable solution.

The solution: teach 3rd graders to use Word to help them with main idea. Here's how it would go...
Find some short articles from Time for Kids at the 2nd to 3rd grade reading level. Copy the article and paste it into Word, develop a question that would lead students to find information from the article that addressed the main idea, teach students to delete any text that did not address the question - in the end leaving them with the question and a list of items from the article that answered the question. This seemed to us to be a great way to get kids to use technology to help them sift through information to remove unneeded pieces of information and keep the necessary information.

But wait! It didn't work! How could such a simple strategy, such an easy way of using technology not work? Well...the technology couldn't possibly make a difference when the real problem was that students just didn't really understand what main idea meant in the first place. Interesting...because for the last two years, when we done the data analysis on our state assessments we've found that main idea and summarizing were areas of weakness from 3rd grade to 5th grade. So, if the kids don't really get it in the first place the technology doesn't matter.

We've been talking about using technology for years with our teachers. Is it possible that our teachers don't really get the concept in the first place? Do they need that concept first before the technology makes a difference? How do we best approach teaching that concept then?

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What are we searching for?

This morning I'm taking a few minutes to go back through my Statcounter account. It's interesting to take a look at the visitor activity but most especially to look at the search terms that people are using. Overwhelmingly, I'm noticing that people are looking for information about how technology affects student learning. And I'm wondering - what blogs are addressing this question well enough to satisfy those who are looking for that information? I'm pretty sure mine isn't - mostly because I'm not a classroom teacher - I'm a technology specialist so I'm reflecting on the issues that are directly affecting me - issues that I'm trying to work through by writing about them.

In the first session I attended at the NECC conference this past summer, the presenter's main purpose was to talk about things we can do with technology that would affect student learning - but not just the technology. She was also talking about the instruction that supports the use of the technology. I'll admit, the presenter was a little difficult to warm up to, but several people got up and walked out. I considered it myself but stayed anyway and was pleasantly surprised at how the session unfolded. I walked away from that session thinking how smart the presenter was in the approach she took to the presentation. But then, I wondered, why didn't other people stay? What were they looking for that they didn't find in this session?

This question of what our teachers and other staff are looking for where technology is concerned has been bothering me a lot lately. I keep thinking they're looking for the "magic bullet" - that one little thing that they can easily implement that will make a difference in student learning. But, there isn't any such thing really -just as there is no "magic bullet" that will help every student to learn to read and read well. We need to try different strategies and different tools until we find what fits our students needs, interests and learning styles. No amount of talking about all the really cool tools out there will help until we as teachers dig in, do our own investigating and try something new supported by well established instructional strategies.

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The Unexpected

The other day I wrote about a workshop I had done and my thoughts about the two kinds of learners that made themselves apparent via the structure of the session. Another thought occurred today and that was that the structure created "the unexpected" for many teachers.

My usual strategy when introducing new tools or teaching teachers how to use tools has been to provide them with materials, complete with screenshots and step-by-step directions, that they'll take with them to use later on. I'd been doing that for many years because teachers had told me they liked having them to go back to. But, in doing so, I may have been creating too much of a crutch for them to lean on. The other problem, if that's what I should call it, is that it really didn't do too much to change teaching practices. Teachers came, they listened, they asked for a repeat of the directions, they practiced a bit and they took the materials with them. But, in the end, many didn't use what they had learned and they haven't internalized some strategies and skills that they can apply with the use of almost any piece of software or technology they encounter.

It reminds me of the kinds of classroom that many have written about - you know...the kind where the teacher teaches, frantically trying to pour all the learning into their student's brains so they can regurgitate it later and never use it again. :) But, it's the unexpected that wakes the brain up, that intrudes on the ho-hum-ness of the same old thing day after day, that gets those neurons firing away in the brain. That's the kind of professional development experiences that I'd like to provide to teachers. They already know a thing or two about the technology - they just need to push beyond that basic level of knowledge (think Bloom's) and get into applying what they know to new things.

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Struggling...

So...you think you've got some cool tools to show to teachers. Tools that will amaze them, excite them, get them thinking. So you show them off, you set up accounts, you give them time to explore, you encourage them to interact with each other to figure out all that each tool has to offer. For some teachers, this is their learning style - just point the way and they'll find the right path. For others this creates panic - "You're not going to show us how to use this?" "We don't even get a tutorial first?"

This was my experience today. It was really great! And...it was really a struggle. I set up four tools: Pageflakes, Writeboard, Google (docs, calendar, iGoogle and maps) and Trailfire. Put together a quick intro using Voice Thread, placed that in a wiki that I had set up as a preview to the session (which no one went to as a preview even though it was in the session description). My VoiceThread intro was all about how the web has changed and it talked about each of the tools one by one giving a little background about how the tool could be used- probably could have done at little more with that whole part of the presentation.

Where did I go wrong? Well, I didn't...not really.... It's just that there were basically two different kinds of teachers in the room and I didn't meet the needs of all of them. So, some walked away muttering about the great tools they saw with one teacher who emailed me later in the afternoon with what he had already created and some walked away talking about needing a lot more support for their learning. Hmmm...I guess lots of kids do that too huh?

The next time...
If I ever get a change to do this again, and I hope I will, I would set up the lab with tools to explore but use the wireless laptops in the library (since it's right next door) to provide a tutorial for those who need it. We have to be able to address those learning styles for teachers just as we do for our students. Today's session was only an hour and a half - which was actually cut short because of the length of the keynote speaker's presentation. Instead of the single session - I'd consider doing a double session instead - spend the first session taking more time to talk about the instructional use of the tools and doing that quick little walk through, then the second session could be devoted to setting up the tools for instruction and for sharing what was accomplished as well as providing that extra support that some teacher learners need.

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Fighting Another Curriculum or Maybe Not

My school district has been working on creating curriculum documents, using them and making revisions for the last four years. We've made some great progress and some good (though sometimes overwhelming) changes have happened. Conversations about technology in the classroom focus on learning goals rather than cool tools.

Because we've spent so much time on the academic curriculum and because so many changes have happened based on this effort, I've not been an advocate of even creating a technology curriculum. Until tonight...

While relaxing and enjoying a little downtime tonight, I came across something on Doug Johnsons' blog that was actually written in January, 2006. He refers to adopting a philosophy of "AND not OR." My focus has been on technology curriculum or no technology curriculum. I've advocated for NO technology curriculum because of all the other things that are currently pressuring our classroom teachers and because my fear was that a technology curriculum would cause us to just simply teach technology for technology's sake and not for the sake of learning. But Doug has reminded me that this doesn't really need to be an "or" situation at all.

Here's what I'm thinking: let's create a technology curriculum but let's write it as something more than just a laundry list of skills that should be accomplished by the end of some particular grade level - the revised NETS comes to mind as a start. Then let's take that curriculum and view our academic curricula through that lens. Perhaps with the addition of a technology curriculum we could really begin to make some headway with technology for learning supported by some more frequent training opportunities for teachers. Many of our teachers are doing good things with technology in our classrooms, some are still dabbling, while others are begging for the opportunity to have the time and the training that would help them move forward. The time is right to think about technology AND!

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Routines and Procedures

Elementary teachers are amazing! Our school year here began this Wednesday and I marvel how, after only three short (and very hot) days the students have already been trained in some regular routines. It almost seems like they never left the building and we're back to business as usual.

As I think about those routines, I think about some parallels between them and the ways we learn to use technology. Here's what typically happens with these simple classroom routines:

• Teacher explains what the expectations for performance are (no talking in the hall, walking in a straight line, hanging backpacks up on the appropriate hooks, sharpening pencils before the day begins and whatever else)
• Teacher guides students through the appropriate performance step by step
  
• Teacher helps students practice and supports the learning of those individuals having difficulties with the performance
• Students are expected to perform independently
• Teacher shapes further performances as needed
  

I think about how that applies to the learning of skills that we teach in technology. We follow the same sort of process whether we're teaching reading strategies or teaching technology skills. If we could take students through the procedural knowledge they need for performing with technology tools with the same intent as we teach them the steps in using a particular reading strategy or walking from the classroom to the cafeteria we could save ourselves so much more time in the long run.

One of the primary teachers I work with recently moved from 1st grade to 2nd grade. She spent a lot of time exploring technology tools with her students and carefully helping them to build some basic skills while in 1st grade. Since she has most of her former 1st graders in her new 2nd grade class she can really see how the development of that procedural knowledge is helping her to move into the use of some more advanced tools with ease.

If we could only take a little extra time at the beginning of the school year to establish technology routines, the payoff throughout the school year would be tremendous. Not only would that benefit the individual teacher but it would set the stage for the next grade level and beyond.

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It's the little things...

I've spent many hours over the past few days doing what we do every year at this time - checking out the little things that may have been missed during summer cleaning/reconnecting/imaging or helping teachers with little things like making sure their projectors are connected properly to computers and in working order. We also strive to get those last minute things out to teachers as quickly as possible, in particular the passwords that will be used by students to gain access to computers. But the most important part of all is the interaction with the teachers and the PR that results from responding to their technology needs as quickly as possible. Those initial connections are priceless.

In 8 short years, we've gone from staff who didn't know how to turn on the computers to staff who can't possibly do without their projectors on the first day of school. This comes, in some part, as a result of training that we've done over the years in a variety of ways - everything from gathering large groups together to meeting with single teachers at their convenience to answer the questions that are burning on their minds at that point in time. One of the most significant things that helped us is the interactions among our teachers - the kind that they've initiated all on their own.

We began our technology infusion with a Model Classroom approach where 2 teachers in every building became the first to get multiple computers in their classrooms. Their role was to share what they were doing within their buildings. From there, we gradually added more computers in two more phases until every classroom was equipped. It wasn't just placing a projector in a classroom or providing them with particular pieces of software that made a teacher want to use it. It was another teacher who had found that really great website or who already had had a projector before them who sat in the staff room talking about using that projector to show the students something on the Internet or demonstrating how they would use a particular piece of software. [I still fondly recall the wonders of trying to arrange 22 first graders around a 12 inch computer screen so that everybody could see how to do something on a computer - a far cry from the projectors we have now!]

From our small beginnings 8 years ago have grown some really great and inspiring instructional uses of technology from many of our teachers with new ideas being developed, implemented or considered all the time. We still struggle with all the issues that other schools and districts struggle with [time and training in particular] and I can spend hours talking about all the things that still frustrate me. But the fact that so many teachers spent so much time making sure that the technology in their rooms was set for the first day has been really inspiring to me. I look forward to continuing to provide any support that I can to our teachers and hope that I can provide the leadership that will help them to achieve their objectives for improving student achievement in our district.

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Test Scores and Professional Development

Two postings are itching at my brain this afternoon. One, from David Warlick, talks about the importance of teacher's getting up to speed with technology in the 21st century. The other, from Karl Fisch, talks about test scores and what we look for in the schools we send our children to. For me, these two postings have many connections.

When Karl talks about test scores as a predictor of school quality I reflect back to the role I'm currently playing in my school district with data analysis. As the person who gathers the test scores, breaks them down by building and then by state standards and performance indicators, I see the trends in performance for all the buildings in which I function as an instructional technology specialist. But, I've also had the opportunity to sit with those teachers and listen to their discussions about various aspects of the test and why their students did or did not handle a particular skill or question well. I hear them talk about the learning goals designated for each question and then their discussion about the teaching strategies they have used or need to use more specifically in order to meet those goals. Our teachers are really focusing on their practice and what they need to adjust in order for students to improve their achievement.

What's missing from the discussion is the role of technology in helping students to develop skills. I'm not just talking about the skills needed to be successful on the test. What the scores are showing us consistently is that our students have difficulty with questions that involve higher level thinking and broad background knowledge. And, what recent history is showing me is that we don't provide enough teacher training in the instructional use of technology. Yes...I still hear the "digital immigrant" excuse - "the kids know more than I do", "I have too many things to do now as it is" and others. But, I don't really see this as an excuse. I see it more as an indicator of our lack of attention to teacher training. If we want to improve student achievement, we need to turn our focus to producing some concrete applications for technology tools supported by strong instructional practices so that teachers begin to see connections between tools, instruction and student learning. The more we work on those connections, the more successful we'll be in bringing our teachers into a more active role in preparing students for the 21st century.

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