Apology to tech directors

I just re-read my last entry and it sounds like I am beating up on tech directors. This was NOT my intent. Brother and sister tech directors, we are truly caught between a rock and a hard place with our goals. My department's lament (taken from some advertisement) is "maximum expectations with minimal resources." Much of what we want and need to do is frustrated by school administrators, legislators and a plain old lack of funding. From Machines Are the Easy Part; People Are the Hard Part:

If you can't afford the whole cure, don't even start it.

I call this the Antibiotic Law of Educational Change.

If you get a prescription to kill a germ, you are sternly warned to keep taking the medicine until it is gone – not just until the symptoms disappear. If you don’t, the bug can come back, strengthened by new resistance to the antibiotic.

We in education kill ourselves by ignoring this rule. We formulate a budget for a program, a grant, or a project then happily accept less than the full amount of the funding request without changing the promised result. We then get half-assed results that demoralize the participants and increase the skepticism of those who funded us.

Don’t accept project funding if it is not for the full amount or make clear that the reduced amount will affect the outcome, and redefine your objectives.

As a tech director, I am more than willing to take responsibility for some of the unmet demands in the Manifesto below - but not all of them!

The Teacher’s Technology Manifesto

(A short riff on an earlier posting "When Techies Don't Get It.")

Dear Technology Director:
I will enthusiastically embrace technology only when the following conditions have been met:

1. Teaching students technology skills is a priority.  Until the high-stakes tests and state standards require that I teach technology skills, I will focus my teaching efforts on what is tested and mandated. Our school board goals are all about reading, writing and math. Until my bosses tell me technology skills are important, I will not spend a week in a lab teaching with technology something I can teach in a day with paper and pencil.
2. Technology use is supported by research showing it is more effective in teaching skills than traditional methods. Until there is unbiased research that shows I can more effectively teach basic and content area skills using technology than traditional methods, I will not change my teaching methods. I will continue to advocate for school budgets be spent on smaller class sizes, better library programs, art and music programs, and services for special needs students.
3. Technology in my school is reliable, adequate, and secure. I use the telephone, the overhead projector and the VCR in my classroom because I can count on them working. I will not use computers, LCD projectors, and the Internet unless they work 99% of the time. And if you ask me to create lesson plans for when the technology works and when it doesn’t, I will dope slap you. If I have 30 children in my class, I need 30 computers actually working in the lab. And effective means to reduce my worries about online stranger-danger and inappropriate websites.
4. Technology use is proven to be safe and developmentally appropriate. Science just doesn’t know the impact of staring at computer screens or using keyboards on small human beings. We do know childhood obesity is on the rise because too many children are inactive. Please let me know when playing with blocks on the screen is proven as beneficial as playing with blocks on the floor.
5. Technology comes with support people with interpersonal skills. I am neither a child nor an idiot nor a fool. Don’t treat me like one. Let me run my own mouse when learning something even if it takes a little longer. Use English when explaining something and tell me only what I need to know. And cut out the cute asides like calling a problem an SUD (Stupid User Dysfunction). I have a Master’s degree. I also need timely technical support. If I have to wait three days to get my computer working again, I will develop a negative attitude.
6. Technology comes with effective training. Classes about a technology that I might someday use taught by an instructor who hasn’t been near a classroom recently are worthless. Teach me in a small group about the things I want and need to do today to be effective. And how about a little follow-up? We are finding Professional Learning Communities effective in implementing other kinds of pedagogical change. Take a hint.
7. Technology is a genuine time-saver. I will not learn to use technology to make someone else’s job easier. I resent having to login three times to get to an application, especially when the usernames and passwords are all long and impossible to remember. I understand the importance of security – but it needs to be balanced with convenience.

Two pieces of advice:
Make sure a committee made up of a wide-range of stake-holders develops technology plans, budgets and policies. You want me to use technology, give the users a say in how it is used, deployed and controlled.

Remember that as a teacher, I consider myself first a child-advocate, second an educator, and only third a technology-user. You might consider thinking of yourself in those terms as well.

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Classroom teachers and librarians, what else needs to happen before all teachers embrace technology? 

When Techies Don’t Get It

A colleague sent around an article, “When Teachers Don’t Get It: Myths, Misconceptions and other Taradiddle” by Jim Holland that appeared on the TechLearning website. Go read it, and then come back.
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OK, I can just hear all the marbles rattling as many of my fellow tech directors nod their heads in agreement with Mr. Holland.

But quite honestly, I was appalled by both the tone and message of the article. Mr. Holland seems not to have an empathetic bone in his body. (There was no bio in the article, but tracking back his e-mail domain, it seems Mr. Holland works for the Arlington, Texas public schools. I’m guessing he has some responsibility for technology.)

It’s time to call out my alter ego, Norm L. Teacher. (Some guys get Spiderman. I get Norm. Life’s not fair.)

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When Techies Don’t Get It
By Norm L. Teacher

Dear Mr. Holland,

Thank you first for adding a new word, “taradiddle,” to my vocabulary. The time I spent reading your article was not wasted.

I am a fairly typical 9th grade Language Arts instructor here in Left Overshoe HS. I meet with five classes of about 30 children for 180 days each year. I am neither a Luddite nor technophobe. I have a computer at home with cable Internet access. I use it to do e-mail, to research and write papers for my graduate classes, to do my banking on-line and to play chess. I have a digital camera I use often. I can set the clock on my VCR.

Yet, I am one of those teachers you say offers “excuses.” Such a pejorative term, “excuses,” Mr. Holland. Let’s both be adults here and call them reasons, shall we, and examine their validity.

“I don’t have time,” you offer as hogwash for not using technology “even when it is placed before [us].”
My guess is that it has been a few years since you’ve been a classroom teacher, Mr. Holland. The name of the game today is accountability. I have state standards to which I must teach. There are state tests that students must pass. Technology is not mentioned in either of these. My goals as a teacher are to make sure my students master the curriculum and pass state tests. My job depends on me meeting these goals. Until technology skills are either a part of our standards or are tested, they will remain a means to an end, not the end itself, as much as this may disappoint you. And until technology proves more efficient or effective than traditional methods in helping me meet these goals, it will be a method I may in good conscience choose not to employ.

Let’s look at your example of Ms Brady using a digital camera and word processing software to complete a “fact vs. opinion” unit. Lovely activity, but one that could be done in a class period with paper and pencil rather than in a week of class periods with the technology components. Having four class periods to reinforce the concept in other ways is a better use of time than possibly giving children exposure (certainly not mastery) of technology skills that will most likely be outdated in a couple years.

Our curricula are packed to the gills, sir. If you let me know which of the state mandated objectives I can remove in order to teach placing a digital photo in a word processing program, I’d be happy to give up this “excuse.”

“We don’t have any good software to use.”
I have vehemently argued against canned, drill and kill software for quite some time. As a creative person myself, I understand the value of what you call “open-ended” software packages or I might call “productivity tools.” These tools - word processors, graphic organizers, spreadsheets, databases, etc. -  are the mental Legos with which my students can construct and display ideas. I don’t like the teacher-proofed software any better than I like teaching with the worksheets that come with the textbook.

I would argue that we don’t have sufficient and sufficiently reliable hardware on which to run our software. My classes of 30 use a lab with 28 machines, which I have never seen all running at one time. I share this lab with a dozen colleagues in my high school and scheduling is a nightmare. My technology director tells me that I should always have two lesson plans – one for when the technology works and one for when it doesn’t. My response to this suggestion would be impolite so I’ll just let it go.

When the district and state decide to make a financial commitment that will ensure me easy access to adequate,  well-supported, fully-functioning equipment that shares with the analog telephone a 99.999% reliability rate, I will stop offering this “bunk” for not embracing technology more completely.

“I am not a computer person.”
Actually you are right about this. I’d like to think of myself as a people person. And I while no one likes looking foolish in front of students (or anyone), I’ve never had a problem admitting personal ignorance on any topic – even to my students. My best staff development experiences in technology have been those when my tech savvy kids, bless their patient little hearts, have done the teaching. The kids teach me the in’s and out’s of Word; I teach them how to write compelling sentences with it. Pretty fair trade, wouldn’t you say?

Please treat me as an adult learner when it comes to technology “training.” I want an IEP, not a boot camp, where I am expected to endure classes on technology of small relevance to my style of teaching or my curriculum. I am sure a spreadsheet is a marvelous tool. I am sure I could learn to use it. I am just not sure why I would want to. Let me spend my scarce time, funds and energies looking at things that I as a “people” person would find useful – brain-based research, best practices in teaching writing, and differentiated instruction, to name a few areas. If you can integrate tech into any of these instructional practices, you bet I'll be there and listening.

Oh, and please use the principles of effective staff development when doing tech training – focus on student achievement, the use of professional learning communities and peer-mentoring. If you want me to be a better tech student, you’d better be a better tech teacher.

Mr. Holland, you techies think about technology 98% of the time and real people think about it 2% of the time. Call me a computer person and I’ll just have to think of something nasty to call you back.

“My students can’t behave – they don’t deserve going to the computer lab.”
Sorry, I am one of those teachers who think (and are backed by research) that personal interest reading increases reading skills. I also happen to think that students when allowed to use the Internet to research topics of personal interest are learning as well.

Despite your best efforts to drain the motivational quality of technology from school, you’ve not quite accomplished it. It remains still the best reason for its use that I have found. My kids do like to write when they are able to edit easily, do peer-review, and publicly share their work because of technology. I’m sure with filters, lock-downs, and limits, you techies will, with enough effort, manage to somehow make technology as thrilling as a basal reader. Keep up the good fight!

“Let’s not Beat Around the Bush” (Why did you capitalize this subheading and not the others? Your editor should be beaten with a copy of Warriner’s Grammar!)
You may not know this, Mr. Holland, but we teachers are not overly fond of being compared to children. It's not a way to win teacher friends. Especially when it is only because we are less than enthusiastic about technology - a movement that can be argued that has never been as much about teaching and learning as it has been about technology company profits.

Give us a little credit for being professionals. Show me the research that definitively shows the use of any technology improves student learning. Convince me that spending on plastic and silicon is more prudent than on early childhood education, lower class sizes, or better libraries. Tell me how the questions in Alliance for Childhood’s Fools Gold and Tech Tonic reports have been answered.

Mr. Holland, when two people have different educational priorities or opinions, it does not make one an adult and the other a child.

Just because “Techs don’t get it,” doesn’t give me license to tease them. I could say thank you for your article because I not only learned the word “taradiddle,” but you allowed me to apply it immediately. But I won’t.

Sincerely,

Norm L. Teacher

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Daniel Pink, in A Whole New Mind, calls empathy one of the skills needed to survive in the “conceptual age.” Until we as techies start empathizing with our teachers, administrators, and students, our efforts will go off course and we will get ulcers.

Happy to read any counter arguments from my techie friends.