Tech In Education, Where Do You Start?
Posted by arvind s grover Wed, 26 Apr 2006 02:59:00 GMT
Supervising a laptop program, I get to meet with interesting people from all over the world who come to see what we do. We talk about hardware/software, professional development, computer science and more. But if you were starting an educational technology program, where would you start?
I would start with decision-makers. If your school is top-down, then your admins need to believe. If you school is more faculty-centered, I would start with the faculty leaders. No matter what, if those who direct the school are not involved, progress is even more difficult than it need be. A bottom-up approach can be tough (although not impossible – viva la revolución de la tecnología!).
That being said, the training for these folks is pedagogical, not technical. Sure you can train people on software, but if they don’t know why, then what’s the point? Educators’ strength is their ability to see possibilities for their students. It is also their weakness, because their vision tends to be within their comfort zone. The vision push I am most interested in is project based learning. Computers, the Internet, and all the other tech tools work best when students have time to push the limits over an extended period of time. 30 minutes at the end of class surfing a website does not a laptop program make. Two weeks grappling over the question “who writes history,” now we’re talking…Technical tools allow students to spend time analyzing, struggling, interpreting, communicating all in the name of understanding. There is no test on which to recall random facts, but rather a project to demonstrate deeper understanding.
Some of my favorite project based learning (PBL) resources include: this video of Seymour Papert talking about PBL, George Lucas Educational Foundation’s Edutopia magazine’s PBL site, 4teachers.org’s PBL checklists, the PBL Design and Invention Center, and for some thought-provoking reading, try David Warlick on breaking the standard mold of education or the Department of Education report, Technology and Education Reform (ch. 8).
Technorati Tags: education, Edutopia, George Lucas, laptop, PBL, professional development, project based learning, Seymour Papert, teachers, teaching
You list some very good resources for PBL .
The point about “teacher training” is so very important. Too often I see training—instructional strategies or technology tools—delivered “out of context” of the classroom.
Teachers are just like students—we need to make it relevant for them.
Those of us involved with planning and implementing professional development on our campus have found the greatest success when the sessions were designed with a “product” focus. We ask teachers to bring to the session a lesson plan or unit plan that they expect to use in the coming weeks (or the next year if the training occurs in the summer)—and then they use that lesson plan during the training sessions.
For example, if I were training teachers how to create a simple PowerPoint for a lesson, they would create a real PowerPoint based on the lesson in hand—instead of just creating a sample lesson plan that has no connection to their classroom. This allows teachers to see how the strategy or skill can be used within their area and allows them to walk away from the training with a real product that they can use in their class.
Training for PBL can be done in a very similar way—it just takes a little longer. We still struggle with getting our teachers to understand the concept of PBL —and to realize that it isn’t just having students create a poster of the topic being studied.
The tools we now have at our disposal make PBL much easier to plan and implement in the classroom than ever before. When we started implementing PBL it wasn’t from a technology focus—and I think that’s why we’ve struggled with it.
The use of blogs and wikis can make interdisciplinary projects much easier to design and much easier to do. The hurdle for those of us who see the potential is how to get others on board (especially those teachers who are still struggling with basic office apps).
I’m still learning what works and doesn’t work in training teachers—maybe some day I’ll figure out the “magic formula”!
I agree with your comments about project-based learning. As teachers, most of us are the opposite of entrepreneurs. Instead of creating valuable products and marketing them, we’re used to working for large organizations with fixed salaries. As such, we’re good at training students to become corporate employees, but those students in our classes with entrepreneurial leanings should also be given chances to work on innovative projects.
I believe that high school students are capable of this and that they are bored because they either aren’t challenged enough or that they don’t find any reason to work hard on the projects we usually assign them.
I realize that my views on education are a bit unorthodox, like those of Paul Graham (the creator of Yahoo! Stores when it was a small startup called ViaWeb):
http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html