Learning at the Speed of Technology - David Jakes

Notes from David Jakes Keynote
Fall 2012 TCEA TECSIG Meeting
October 4, 2012
Austin, Texas
All resources posted at davidjakes.me

Question: Are we taking brand new disruptive technologies and trying to force them into old models?

The emerging model in business today is BYO3 - Bring Your Own Laptop/Tablet/Phone

We are coming to a price point where schools can provide small tablets and allow students to bring their own devices for learning as well.

We are still on the grid model - classrooms with desks in rows. Even when we put technology into the classroom. We are putting new technologies into old classroom models.

Students may have tons of devices, but don't know how to use them deeply beyond texting and recording. How do teachers manage the multiple platforms.

Regarding student use of technology, Mimi Ito says, "Students engage in friendship and interest-based activities. They need academic intervention..." For example, students are engaged in social activities an passion based research (if they love photography, they look for photography info).

Richard Halverson: "Digital media provides a path to personalizing and customizing learning...this has meant that digitally literate young people have come to understand that there are at least two living channels for learning 1. an institutional channel, and 2. a peer-driven, interest-driven, and unregulated digital media channel.

How can we help students build the skills they need to learn on their own if we are not providing digital teaching and learning spaces (online spaces)?

DIGITAL = DISRUPTIVE

Mission vs Vision - What's the difference?

Our mission has not changed: Help kids learn. Our vision for how that occurs should change over time as new technologies emerge.

Do we live and breathe our mission and vision every day in what we do and how we act?

What do you want learning to look like?

What do you want your school to be?

Unifying Theme: The Ecology of Things
is represented by the sum of the connections between people, information, ideas, and technology and are manifested through the interactions that occur in the physical and digital spaces of the school.

Things: apps, cloud-based programs that allow us to share and collaborate on projects. (Example: WeVideo for Google Drive.)

Unifying Theme: Transliteracy
is the ability to read, write, and interact across a range of platforms, tools, and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.

Kids have to exhibit an ability to negotiate across a range of modalities from face-to-face to world-wide virtual connections.

Unifying Theme: Content, Skills, Habits of the Mind, Dispositions and Experiences

In education, we tend to cover content, skills, habits of mind, and dispositions well. Are we providing the range of experiences needed to successfully cover all of the contemporary skills, habits, etc that modern students need? Or is their primary experience sitting in rows??

What If? School As Studio

School as studio - spaces that inspire, spaces that support remix and creation, spaces that together contribute to the "ecology of things" Spaces where boundaries for learning do not exist. Spaces that support the timeless value of teacher-student interaction.

Do we have these kinds of spaces in our schools? Spaces with room to move, inviting colors, comfortable furniture? Where do kids hang out in your school and why?

There are models out there. Blue School is an example. How can spaces in your school be re-designed?

What If? School as App

School as portal School on demand. School as node with 24/7 connections.

mySchool app?
myINSERTYOURSCHOOLNAMEHERE

How have you positioned your school for anywhere, anytime, any device learning? Are you designing for mobile?

Are you providing digital learning spaces where students have ownership of their content? Where it is not locked in a learning management system? (Ex: Google Apps accounts).

What If? School as Network

Learning is now independent of time, space, and place. Schools serv to link learniers.

Network as School

Anyone can be a teacher, anyone can be a learner. Learning not limited to a class roster.

Standford MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence - 180,00 enrolled; 6,000 have completed

mobiMOOC - Course where participants self-organize based on their interests in mobile learning.

M.I.T. - Has been offering open online courses for 10 years. Is now launching MITx where instructor is involved. More students have successfully completed a course on circut design since it's been online than in the 40 years of face-to-face only prior to that.

Skill Share, Hour School - people who voluntarily organize around learning experiences.

What If? School as Canvas

The school canvas paints a picture of the capabilities of the human beings associated with school. The school canvas illuminates their presence and ideas locally and globally to create a conversation aobut the learning taking place, and about the passions being explored.

Make it OK for kids to publish their work with their names to create a positive digital footprint.

Youmedia - YOUmedia is an innovative, 21st century teen learning space housed at the Chicago Public Library's downtown Harold Washington Library Center. YOUmedia was created to connect young adults, books, media, mentors, and institutions throughout the city of Chicago in one dynamic space designed to inspire collaboration and creativity.

What If? School as Third Place

Part of the connective ecosystem, part of being transliterate, is to be able to step away from technology and have the face-to-face conversation, the quiet reflection experience, and time away from technology.

Schools need informal spaces for learning. Think Starbucks, Barnes & Noble coffee shop...


Update October 21, 2012 - A recording of David's presentation has been posted online. If my notes left you wanting more (they should have!), you can now view the whole thing for yourself!

Confessions and Learnings of an EdTech Enabler

Photo Used Under a Creative Commons License

Some Typical EdTech Scenarios

Ms. Jones calls in a panic - her students are trying to get to the documents she shared with them on the school server and no one can find them. "The folder was just there," she says, "and now it's gone!" Knowing her history of "organizing" things, I run down to her classroom and in two shakes I move the folder students need access to out of the other folder where she's stored it. I want to explain that students only have access to this folder in this location, and when she moves it, they can't see it any more, but she's already lost valuable instructional time, so I quickly exit as she thanks me profusely and declares me to once again be the most amazing technology guru she's ever met. I vow to myself to follow up later, especially since she keeps doing this, but a day full of similar "emergencies" pushes the latest incident right out of my head...

Mr. Scott snags me in the hall as I am trying to get to the restroom. "I'm trying to use the clickers with my students and my computer screen and projector have gone black!" He pulls me in the door and I see the expectant faces of students, clickers at the ready. I go wiggle the power cable for the powered VGA splitter, and presto, we have visuals again! "Oh, thank you thank you thank you!" he says as he signals the students to applaud me. I really want to show him quickly how simple the fix was, but I've turned red at the attention and Mr. S. has already segued into, "OK, students, let's get started!" I slink out of the room, finally make it to the bathroom, and head back to my computer to send a tech tip to the campus about wiggling their projector connections (this is the third time I've helped someone this week) when the phone rings and caller ID says it's my principal...

It is one of those rare years when the campus is getting new computers (this happens every five or six years if you are lucky), and I've been asked to consult on the standard software image I want on the computers. OK, here's the software list. Now, which shortcut icons do I want on the desktop? Let's make sure the teachers and students can get to their most-used programs, network, and Internet resources without a lot of effort. I could show them how to make shortcuts themselves, but they're already so busy. (Ironically, I'm forgetting at this moment how often teachers tell me they "don't have a program on their computer" because they don't see a shortcut on the desktop...)

These stories are probably very familiar sounding if you are a technology specialist or even a tech savvy instructor on your campus. To many of the folks on your campus, you are the smartest person ever when it comes to technology. Magical even, because you know how to make things work and you make things easy for them. It can be ego-boosting to be thought of this way, but it can also be a burden, getting in the way of making progress with incorporating new technology tools and approaches because you are busy maintaining the status quo.

Learnings From My Experiences

The stories above are based very closely on my personal experiences. I stayed in that guru role as a campus technology specialist for six years, not so much out of the ego boost it sometimes gave, but out of the mistaken assumption that by making technology as easy and hassle-free as possible for my teachers, I was furthering instructional technology integration and student learning on my campus. I didn't see the connection then between what I was doing and my frustration over not being able to do more new things with my teachers or the fact that they seemed to advance little, if at all, in their skill and comfort with technology.

After those six years, I moved up to a district-level position and I watched how the person who took my previous campus position held teachers' hands a little less than I did - and how their tech skills and expertise improved. It was exciting for me to watch, and humbling at the same time. I fretted a bit over opportunities I might have lost for growing my colleagues, and vowed to do better as I moved forward.

This year, all of this helping really hit home. Due to budget cuts, the instructional technology staff in our district has been reduced to 1/3 of what it was just two years ago. I can see now that I wasn't the only campus specialist who was massively "supporting" teachers in instructional technology. For the first time in 11 years, there isn't a dedicated technology facilitator on each campus. I can see how much of a loss many of our staff members are at by the types of questions that are coming through our electronic help desk. And now, I'm making video tutorials on how to create a short-cut on your desktop.

What have I learned from all of this? First of all, teachers need technology support. They really ARE busy and have more demands on them than ever when it comes to instruction - differentiating for the multiple learning styles and special needs in their classrooms, analyzing testing data to push children to meet state and federal standards, supporting kids who may have little support outside of school for various reasons, not to mention trying to integrate technology into teaching and learning - the list is endless.

The biggest lesson I've learned, though, is there is a difference between enabling and empowering. An enabling approach is the one I used to have - do whatever I can to help the teachers survive the day (and then wonder why I'm helping with the same things over and over and over again...). An empowering approach prioritizes educating teachers in how to do the "little" things, like making desktop shortcuts or wiggling power cables. And it acknowledges that there is no time like the present to do this. 

As a Result of My Learning...

Even if the students are waiting expectantly with clickers in hand, I can call the teacher over and briefly say, "I know you want to move on, but let me show you this quickly, so when it happens again, you don't have to wait on me to fix it." Am I impacting instructional time at that moment? Yes. But how much more future instructional time am I saving by taking that moment to teach that brief lesson?

If the principal is calling while I'm creating/sending an important tech reminder, chances are they can leave a message and wait five minutes for me to get back to them. In the interest of impacting staff with important and helpful info, it's a good trade-off. I'll also add here that it's also worth my time to make a quality tutorial (print, video, etc) and post it where it can be accessed over and over again. As opposed to dashing off quick instructions that will only exist in someone's email and will get lost and therefore cost the teacher precious time they have to ask the same question again. It will also save me time when I can send a quick link to someone the next time the question is asked instead of having to dig out or retype the instructions.

Will these empowering techniques work every time? No, I might answer the same question again, but much like with teaching kids, over time, reinforcement will win out and I'll have empowered a teacher to move on on their own and perhaps, if I'm lucky, also emboldened them to try something new because of the confidence their technology learning is building in them.

Have you had similar experiences, frustrations, and learnings regarding support of educational technology? Please add to the conversation by adding to the comments below!

Pressing On in the New School Year

As I start my 20th year in education, a profession I still love, I want to be energized and excited and open to possibilities.

The truth is, I'm anything but those things right now. Right now I'm just tired. There are several reasons for why I feel the way I feel, some of which I can identify and some of which I may be ignorant of, but regardless, it's where I am.

Even when I'm feeling discouraged, I try not to be Debbie Downer (or maybe Sandy Sadsack?) on my blog, because I want it to be a place people come for ideas and encouragement, but I also know it is important to be authentic.  Authenticity is important for the sake of my own reflection (I occasionally peruse my old blog posts to assess where I've been and as a result where I am and where I might be going) and for the sake of my readers. Because some of you probably struggle sometimes, and you need to know you're not alone.

Regardless of how I'm feeling, the cycle of the school year moves ever forward. In my district, the teachers have been back for a week and the kids start back tomorrow. So, I must press on.

Because of the way I'm feeling right now, I am thankful for coming across an intriguing video yesterday. This article on Skills Every 21st Century Teacher Should Know kept appearing in my Twitter stream and on the professional groups I subscribe to on Facebook, and on Saturday I finally clicked on it. I really didn't expect any surprises, but I did run across a treat.

A video of high school librarian  Joyce Valenza speaking last year at TEDx Philadelphia was embedded in the article. In it she recaps the evolution of how students seek information and what they do with it, starting in 1989. It wasn't lost on me that 1989 was the year I started college, already knowing I was going to be an educator.

Watching the video did not suddenly re-energize me, but it did remind me of why I do what I do, why all educators do what they do, is so very important, especially in the over-information age in which we live. In an age where technology gives people of all ages unprecedented access to information and a vast array of options for using that information.

Watching the video reminded me of one of my core beliefs: One of the most important things we as educators must continue to do is help our students learn a foundational set of facts in science and history and work with those facts and their implications through math and writing and literature. I have read in numerous corners of the blogosphere that rote memorization is so 20th Century, and yet we must teach students to be critical thinkers and recognize bad information when they see it. How can they do that if they don't have a solid foundation to reference?

As we continue to impart a solid foundation of basic knowledge to our students, we must also help them learn what to do with the information. And it must go beyond the research paper regurgitation students of my generation were taught. (Substituting PowerPoint or Prezi or pick your favorite publishing tool for the typed paper does not count.) In the hands of a well-educated, determined "average" citizen, technology can become a tool for change and progress. We have an equally important responsibility to teach students how to leverage these tools and use them for noble purposes. And how to recognize and combat those who will use the same tools to inflict harm on others.

Energy and excitement ebb and flow throughout a person's career and lifetime. Purpose, however, can remain a constant. So although I am admittedly tired right now, I am thankfully reminded of my purpose. Wherever you are personally as the school year may be starting or continuing for you, I encourage you to do something that will remind you of your purpose. Perhaps watching the video below will remind you, as it did me, that the meaning of "education" and "being educated" has changed vastly over the last 25 years, and it is our privilege to guide our students and even the education profession itself through the ever-evolving education landscape. Press on!