What tech skills do your subs need?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about pockets of employees in our district who we've overlooked for technology training. (The Lost Souls of Technology Training) At Tuesday's 1:1 iLearn77 project professional development day, a teacher brought up another group: substitute teachers.

We've already had Smartboard training for substitutes who volunteer to participate. There is an expectation subs know some basics about using our student information system to take attendance. Most, I believe, can get a video running through the computer and LCD projector. But even then, I hear reports of these folks struggling. (Smart ones have always had students assist.)

With tablets being used in our district for a multiplicty of tasks, including accessing our CMS Moodle instead of a print textbook, my concern is that we may be leaving most of our substitute teachers even further in the dust of educational change.

One of our departmental tasks next year will be to create a list of tech skills all subs need to know and try to figure out a means of helping these brave souls master them.

Any brilliant ideas out there for helping your substitute teachers learn the now everyday tools of the teaching craft? 

The educated Luddite

On this Father's Day, I am guessing many parents are wondering what kind of advice to give their children about living long, happy, healthy, meaningful, fulfilling lives - that hopefully include satisfying careers from which financial independence from said parents is a happy result.

One of the great stories we tell about the United States is how socially and economically mobile our society has always been. The Horatio Alger "rags to riches" parable that with work, education and good morals anyone can become rich - or at least comfortably middle class - was certainly drummed into me as a child. Neither my mother or father had a college degree, but they both saw college as path toward a better life and encouraged me to attend. And that's worked out pretty well. My college degrees have been the gateway to a career that has employed and fed me and mine for nearly 40 years.

But amid a growing number of voices, NY Times columnist Paul Krugman is questioning whether a college education is still a means of achieving economic security. Klugman compares today's changing job market to the Luddite movement of 18th century England in his recent column Sympathy for the Luddites. About the Luddites he observes:

...the workers hurt most were those who had, with effort, acquired valuable skills — only to find those skills suddenly devalued.

So are we living in another such era? And, if we are, what are we going to do about it?

Traditionally vocational and professional education (gaining specialized skills) has been an insurance policy against being displaced by new technologies. While technology has been good at replacing repetitive physical skills and low-level communication skills  (see Gone Missing), artificial intelligence has remained, uh, artificial. But now Krugman writes

Today, however, a much darker picture of the effects of technology on labor is emerging. In this picture, highly educated workers are as likely as less educated workers to find themselves displaced and devalued, and pushing for more education may create as many problems as it solves. [basing this on a report by the Kinsey Global Institute on disruptive technologies] ... Even a quick scan of the report’s list suggests that some of the victims of disruption will be workers who are currently considered highly skilled, and who invested a lot of time and money in acquiring those skills. For example, the report suggests that we’re going to be seeing a lot of “automation of knowledge work,” with software doing things that used to require college graduates. Advanced robotics could further diminish employment in manufacturing, but it could also replace some medical professionals.

concluding...

Education, then, is no longer the answer to rising inequality,
if it ever was (which I doubt).

Hmmmm, I will leave to the economic pundits to solve the problems of increasing economic disparities in the U.S. and elsewhere. My question, then, is just was is education the answer to?

To the dismay of the more conservative sectors of our society, I have personally long held that we ought to view education as far more than vocational training anyway. One of my favorite quotes is by Sidney Harris -  "The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s leisure." How impractical, how wasteful, and how vague.

Yet how important.

My son is getting closer to getting his bachelor's degree in graphic arts (he promises). He already has an AA in video production. Given today's competitive job market in these areas, will he ever use these degrees to earn a middle-class standard of living? I don't know. He is talented and hard-working so he has a good chance. But I don't know and he didn't like my suggestion of guaranteed employability as a speech therapist.

But I am not sure that career preparation is as important as it once was. Chances are that the economic success of Brady's generation is as likely to come from entrepreneurship as it is follwing pre-planned vocational path. 

Oh, my answer to "what is an education the answer to?" I don't think there is one right answer, but an answer that is right for each individual child and family.

Good luck, moms and dads of today. 

Image source

BFTP: Cultural change

A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past.  Original post May 28, 2008.

Five years ago, I wrote: "We seem poised in our technology efforts to make some of these school culture changes." We still seem "poised" - closer, maybe, but not really there. Some teachers and classrooms have changed dramatically, but the majority have not. Check back in 2018.

I've been thinking about Michael Wesch's talk I heard at last week's e-learning conference. He called his keynote "Human Futures for Technology and Education" and made some interesting points. We are seeing, he observes, a movement toward:

• User generated content (YouTube)
• User generated filtering (digg)
• User generated organization (del.icio.us)
• User generated distribution (RSS)
• User generated commentary (blogs)
• User generated ratings (Technorati)

and concludes we are experiencing not a technology or information revolution, but a cultural revolution.  He also remarked that while we might easily say "Some students are just not cut out for school," we would not say "Some students are just not cut out for learning."

Wesch obviously looks at technology through the lens of both a cultural anthropologist and an educator - the combination that makes him very interesting indeed. And I would agree that we are experiencing cultural changes brought about by technology.

What I am wondering about is just how fast and universal these changes are - and if any changes brought about by technology in education can be considered truly cultural to date.

The variety of rates at which the tools above are being adopted by the general population was brought home to me vividly by a phone call I received last Monday from Don, a retired teacher who serves on our local lakes association board. He wanted to know how many visitors the association website was getting. Logging on as webmaster, I found out the site had been averaging about 25 hits a month so far this year. I was mortified; Don was delighted. "Wow, that's almost one a day!" (Take a look a the site - if we get up to 2 visitors a day average, it'll really make Don a happy camper.)

On that same day, I read a blog post by Amy that recommended  Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income and the writer strategized how she could increase her blog readership. I suspect one would need more than "almost" a visitor a day to hit that six figure income. Don and Amy may both be part of the same cultural revolution - but for Don it's revolving att 33 1/3 rpm - while Amy is mp3. (A recent study identified only 6% of American consumers as "digital savvy.")

Last week, when Scott McLeod asked his blog readers about "long term, substantive, sustainable change that occurred in your organization," I was sincerely hard pressed to identify such a change - let alone think about who or what caused it - especially a change abetted by technology. If I survive two more weeks in my current position, I will have completed 31 school years as a teacher, librarian, or technology director. And things are more the same in 2008 than they are are different from my first year teaching in 1976. Some changes, yes; cultural changes, substantive changes, no. For the most part adults are still putting 20-30 kids in hard desks in square rooms, talking at them, and requiring them to regurgitate what we told them. 

To use Zuboff's terms, we have "automated" some aspects of education with technology: attendance, grading, lectures, and communication. But what we have yet to do is "infomate it" - do things we could not do before there was technology.

What would real cultural change look like in education?

• All students would have meaningful Individual Education Plans specifically written to their learning styles and needs.
• Classrooms would be truly differentiated with all students learning in their own way, at their own pace. Chronological segregation would not happen.
• Personal motivation and relevance for learning would be a prime ingredient in education.
• Constructivism would be the main pedagogy, not a once-a-year term paper or project.
• Data mining would genuinely determine the most effective teaching methods, teachers, and conditions for learning.
• Distance learning would be the norm, opening huge opportunities for students to learn according to interest from the very best instructors.
• Gaming would be the norm and teachers would be game coaches.
• Schools would be genuinely pleasant places where student want to be.
• Assessments would measure individual growth over time, not compare students to artificial norms at snapshots in time.

We seem poised in our technology efforts to make some of these school culture changes. I am not holding my breath for any of these things to happen, but you never know.

Has technology changed school culture? Will it? What will it look like?