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Six Lingering Obstacles to Using Technology in Schools

June 20, 2012 | 11:19 AM | By

Flickr:Marygrove College Library

Though educators are finding smart ways to integrate technology and learning, the road has been and continues to be challenging on multiple fronts. The NMC Horizon Report: 2012 K-12 Edition, a collaboration between the New Media Consortium, the Consortium for School Networking, and the International Society for Technology in Education, takes the birds-eye view and encapsulates some of the significant challenges that must still be addressed and offers the following assessment.

Behind the challenges listed here is also a pervasive sense that local and organizational constraints are likely the most important factors in any decision to adopt — or not to adopt — a given technology. Even K-12 institutions that are eager to adopt new technologies may be constrained by school policies, the lack of necessary human resources, and the financial wherewithal to realize their ideas. Still others are located within buildings that simply were not designed to provide the radio frequency transparency that wireless technologies require, and thus find themselves shut out of many potential technology options. While acknowledging that local barriers to technology adoptions are many and significant, the advisory board focused its discussions on challenges that are common to the K-12 community as a whole. The highest ranked challenges they identified are listed here, in the order in which the advisory board ranked them.

1. Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession, especially teaching. This challenge appears at the top of the list because despite the widespread agreement on the importance of digital media literacy, training in the supporting skills and techniques is still very rare in teacher education. As classroom professionals begin to realize that they are limiting their students by not helping them to develop and use digital media literacy skills across the curriculum, the lack of formal training is being offset through professional development or informal learning, but we are far from seeing digital media literacy as a norm. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that digital literacy is less about tools and more about thinking, and thus skills and standards based on tools and platforms have proven to be somewhat ephemeral.

2. K-12 must address the increased blending of formal and informal learning. Traditional lectures and subsequent testing are still dominant learning vehicles in schools. In order for students to get a well- rounded education with real world experience, they must also engage in more informal in-class activities as well as learning to learn outside the classroom. Most schools are not encouraging students to do any of this, nor to experiment and take risks with Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Research, Teaching With Tech, CoSN, ISTE, NMC Horizon Report

The 7 Golden Rules of Using Technology in Schools

July 6, 2011 | 3:43 PM | By

Flickr:David Ortez

Sometimes teachers and administrators need a kick in the pants to see what they perceive as problems re-framed in a different way. Adam S. Bellow, author of The Tech Commandments, and founder of eduTecher, spoke to a roomful of receptive teachers at the recent ISTE 2011 conference, and demonstrated some of the ironies and contradictions the education system is mired in. And he had some advice.

1) DON’T TRAP TECHNOLOGY IN A ROOM. “When I went to school, computers were put in a room called The Lab,” Bellow said. “‘What are they experimenting with in there, I thought.’ Technology wasn’t built into what we were doing. It was farmed off in a room, like it was special. Like we were learning how to code, and in case the Russians came, we’d know what to do.” Technology should be like oxygen, Bellow said, quoting Chris Lehmann, the founding principal of Science Leadership Academy: Ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible.

“We’re doing kids a major disservice if we don’t teach them good digital citizenship.”

2) TECHNOLOGY IS WORTHLESS WITHOUT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT. Bellow emphasized the importance of making professional development a priority, the importance of time and money being spent to educate teachers on not just an hour-long how-to session, but ways to integrate technology creatively into educators’ daily teaching practice in meaningful ways. He told the story of an interactive-whiteboard training guide who made one quick appearance at a school, never to return, leaving teachers still unsure of how to use the technology. There’s a world of professional development on YouTube and on Twitter, ironically sites that most schools block (see Number 4.)

3) MOBILE TECHNOLOGY STRETCHES A LONG WAY. “You can get much more out of mobile tech than out of most other technology,” Bellow said. Kids bring it to class everyday, but we tell them to turn it off as soon as they walk in. In New York City, Bellow said he watched as an agonizingly long queue of students waited for 45 minutes to pass through a metal detector and hand over their cell phones, which were then placed in individually labeled manila envelopes. “Can we do something better with those 45 minutes?” he asked. Cell phones can replace expensive reference books, Flip cameras, old calculators, and the list goes on. “Instead of buying those tools, buy an iPod Touch and it’ll be all of those things,” he said. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Teaching With Tech, Adam S. Bellow, creative commons, Facebook, iPad, ISTE, ISTE 2011, iTouch, mobile, Mobile Learning

Weekly News Roundup: ISTE 2011 Edition

July 1, 2011 | 10:19 AM | By
 

Audrey Watters

Another ISTE attendee.

 

The International Society for Technology in Education held its annual conference and exhibition this week in Philadelphia. While the official headcount has yet to be released, early estimates pegged the number of attendees at over 20,000.

In lieu of our typical weekly review of ed-tech news, we’ve opted to focus instead on some of the announcements that came out of ISTE 2011.

  • Educational animation site BrainPOP launched GameUp, a free resource that integrates educational games into the BrainPOP platform. The game titles include “Battleship Numberline” and “Microbes” and come from organizations like iCivics, Filament Games, and Nobelprize.org. The games focus on topics like science, math, and social studies, and like the rest of the BrainPOP materials include supplemental information for teachers such as how to use the game in a lesson, which curriculum standards the game is aligned to, as well as a link to one related BrainPOP topic.
  • PBS launched PBS Learning Media, an online resource with over 14,000 pieces of digital content, including video, audio, photos, and more. The content comes from various local public broadcasting stations, as well as other public agencies, such as the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and NASA. The site is available to teachers and parents, and the material is all tagged and searchable, so that information can be found by content type, age type or topic. See our full story here.
  • ISTE itself released a white paper this week that offers a first look at ISTE’s new standards for technology coaching. The proposed NETS*C won’t be finalized until this fall, but the white paper discusses ISTE’s latest set of standards and the organization’s recommendations for helping integrate technology more fully into professional development. Continue reading →
FILED UNDER: blackboard, BrainPop, ISTE, ISTE11, McGraw-Hill, PBS, PBS LearningMedia, project tomorrow, Promethean

Four New Initiatives from the Department of Education

June 28, 2011 | 2:48 PM | By

data.ed.gov

Interactive map on data.ed.gov

“Now is the time,” said Karen Cator, director of education technology at the Department of Education. “We’re at this incredible inflection point as we go from print to digital.”

Cator enumerated the ways in which the D.O.E. is helping to make the shift between the print and digital world at the ISTE conference yesterday.

1. TRANSPARENCY. Data.Ed.Gov is an interactive map that pintpoints which schools in the U.S. have broadband. It’s a collaboration with the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Inofrmation Administration. “If we can build those kinds of maps that we can layer on what’s happening in all these schools around country, that provides transparency and something that people can aspire to, follow,” Cator told me late last year.

2. DIGITAL LITERACY. DigitalLiteracy.gov was recently launched by a group of federal government agencies to help build computer and Internet skills, a free resource for anyone. A description from the site: “To provide librarians, teachers, workforce trainers, and others a central location to share digital literacy content and best practices. These trusted groups can, in turn, better reach out to their communities in providing them the skills today’s employers need.” Educators have their own dedicated link.

3. BRING YOUR OWN DEVICE ADVICE. For educators who want to find the best way to leverage their students’ devices, whether it’s their mobile phones or home laptops, CoSN’s newly launched Access4ed provides a host of resources about working experiments. From the site: “It will include conversations around key issues, case studies from districts addressing them, discussion of policy issues and how to address them, and opportunities to connect with education leaders in districts similar to and different from yours.”

4. CLEARING HOUSE FOR PROFESSIONAL NETWORKS. Cator described it to me this way: “If I’m a teacher, I maintain a profile, I let others into my professional learning network to see the conversations and the communities I’m a part of. I can follow fellow educators that might be involved in interesting projects and trying new projects in the classroom. So it goes beyond just following people on Twitter, but creating a profile for professional educators.” The idea of this “persistent online profile” is the Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, CoSN, Department of Education, ISTE, ISTE11, Karen-Cator

Games, Gadgets and the Cloud: Coming Soon to a School Near You

June 10, 2011 | 12:30 PM | By

Flickr: Môsieur J. [version 5.1.1

Computer games and mobile devices will be prevalent in schools within the next few years.

Cloud computing and mobile learning: That’s the way of the near future in education, according to the New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition.

Released by the NMC’s Horizon Project, the report distills current trends, challenges, and emerging technologies in K-12 education. “There are so many things to pay attention to in the world of emerging technologies,” says New Media Consortium CEO and Horizon Project founder Dr. Larry Johnson. “What we’re saying is, ‘Pay attention to this small list and you won’t go wrong.’”

The report is full of specific examples of what’s really happening in schools, but Johnson recommends keeping a close eye on the following trends.

FILED UNDER: Research, cloud computing, Consortium for School Networking, CoSN, International Society for Technology in Education, ISTE, Mobile Learning, New Media Consortium, NMC Horizon Report 2011 K-12 Edition