Teaching With Tech

teaching with tech

What Online Tools Work for Teaching Language Arts?

January 3, 2013 | 12:16 PM | By Katrina Schwartz

Erin Scott

When it comes to language arts, the jury’s still out on the quality and effectiveness of the available software. Some schools are investing and experimenting with different products, with mixed results, while others are working with free available web 2.0 tools. Here are two case studies examining each approach.

THE SOFTWARE APPROACH

Firstline Schools, a public charter school company in New Orleans operating five schools, has aggressively pursued blended learning with hopes to help students who have fallen behind — especially after the devastating effects on schooling after Hurricane Katrina.

“We can’t imagine going back to a traditional model,” said Chris Liang-Vergara, director of instructional technology for personalized learning at Firstline. “It seems crazy with the amount of differentiation we need.”

Firstline uses Achieve3000 in some schools, a program that allows students to read a nonfiction

“The biggest issue I still see is that people are still trying to break it down when
it needs to be combined.”

article everyday and answer questions related to it. But the program is dry, according to Liang-Vergara, and it can seem random and disconnected to the rest of what students are doing in class. He says he’s seen it used well, but usually by experienced teachers who are empowered to use it for the best kind of differentiation. If the teacher takes the time to search the Achieve300 database for nonfiction articles that are relevant to other class work, discusses them, and wraps them into the curriculum that works best. And the software does provide differentiation, increasing the difficulty of vocabulary and sentence structure as a reader progresses.

“When you show it to any experienced teacher, they get very excited because they think about how much time they’ll save and how much information can be at their fingertips,” said Liang- Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Digital Tools, Teaching Strategies, blended learning, digital citizenship, language arts, literacy, teaching with tech

It’s Time: Create Smart Policies to Support Student Tech Use

December 18, 2012 | 10:30 AM | By Katrina Schwartz

Technology has become a seamless part of students’ lives in and out of the classroom, and schools must find ways to integrate it. This is one of the conclusions in a report by the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE), which states that policymakers at the highest level need to understand the trend and form a cohesive course of action for schools to follow.

In Born in Another Time: Ensuring Educational Technology Meets the Needs of Students Today — And Tomorrow the NASBE focuses on the importance of understanding students’ needs, ensuring that teachers are prepared to meet those needs, and shoring up the technical infrastructure that will allow schools to participate.

“Our kids are digitally savvy when it comes to gaming, texting, and social networking, but when it comes to information, even the best students can be digital doofuses.”

Up until now, much of the enthusiasm for education technology, blended learning, online courses and other digital aids in the classroom have come from teachers themselves. In fact, many ed-tech companies are pursuing a teacher-first strategy, opting to hook the educator and avoid the complicated bureaucracy of selling to school districts. That has left a patchwork of tools and uncertainty among some teachers who would like to take advantage of new tech tools, but aren’t sure how to get started.

“State boards of education along with their state education agencies are key to providing the leadership on education technology issues our school systems need to ensure students are ready for life and work in a digital era,” wrote the NASBE study group tasked with investigating emerging tech trends. At the same time the report acknowledges that the current landscape is a “wild, wild west” of various products and approaches. “Because of their formal responsibilities, state education systems are the only entities able to offer a sustainable platform for aligning these promising—but still fragmented and rapidly changing — forces,” the report said. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Big Ideas, Culture, Policy, teaching with tech

To Make Blended Learning Work, Teachers Try Different Tactics

November 2, 2012 | 11:57 AM | By Katrina Schwartz

Erin Scott

By now, most would agree that technology has the potential to be a useful tool for learning. Many schools have invested in some form of technology, whether it’s in computer labs, tablets, or a laptop for every student, depending on their budget.

But for many schools, finding a way to integrate the use of tech in a traditional setting — teacher-centered classrooms — is proving to be a challenge. What educational software should be used? What criteria should the software be judged against? And what happens to the role of the teacher and classroom activities when students are using software for practice exercises?

At this point, just a couple of years into the movement, there are no definitive answers yet. Different schools are trying different blended learning models. Most schools allot a designated computer lab time when students use computers for math, literacy, or other type of software. But teachers who are more advanced in using technology and more comfortable with experimenting have students rotate through different learning modalities at different times, including time for online learning, working with the teacher face-to-face, and working on projects in groups fluidly. In the most extreme cases, students spend most of their day on computers, just as they would in the workplace.

“It’s going to be more about teachers having nimble classrooms.”

But for any of those tactics to work, educators agree that the key is to have a clear vision of what the technology is being used for, and how that will affect the teacher’s role. For schools just beginning to dabble in classroom technology, that’s a daunting idea. Many aren’t willing to upend the existing systems for this new model.

Catlin Tucker, an English teacher in Windsor, Calif., who integrates tech into her students’ school and homework, takes full advantage of what the technology affords her. “Shifting some work online Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Big Ideas, Culture, Digital Tools, Teaching Strategies, blended learning, teaching with tech, Technology in Schools

How Should Teaching Change in the Age of Siri?

November 1, 2012 | 10:44 AM | By MindShift

By Marsha Ratzel

“Siri, can you tell me what 2x+7 is?”

You know the future is rushing towards us when students no longer ask the teacher if they can use a calculator, but instead ask if they can ask Siri.

Siri shows a plot of the equation, what kind of geometric shape it is, and loads of other things that are well above the needs of eighth-graders. The image on the screen looked remarkably like the data one finds at the Wolfram Alpha site. And sure enough, turns out Wolfram is built right into the Siri help menu.

Clearly it won’t take long for students to realize how easy this is to access. In a year’s time they’ll likely be well entrenched in using Siri or some Siri surrogate to find the answers to math problems and potentially lots of questions in other subjects.

In that light, how should teaching change?

Short of banning smartphones (a short-term solution, at best), the evolution of artificial intelligence services like Siri means that there will be a shift from a focus on finding the answer as the endpoint to a greater focus on analysis. You have the answer, but so what? What does that answer mean in a real-life situation?

Should teachers just take the bit that they have traditionally needed for this kind of problem or should they figure out how to use this extra information provided by Siri to push students’ thinking beyond where it usually goes with eighth graders?

Lessons are designed with the assumption that students will use readily available technology.

Taking digital tools and mobile technologies into account (not to mention Common Core expectations), it’s obvious that multiple-choice and true-false questions are not going to cut it anymore. Instead, educators have to design questions that force students into drawing conclusions and using the proof process that many of them haven’t encountered yet.

One method of practicing problem-solving is giving students both the question and the answer and asking them to explain how to solve the problem — how you harvest the information from the problem and show the steps in the solution.

Here’s an example: Instead of reviewing the commutative and distributive properties with a worksheet where they would be able to enter the equation into Siri and get the answer, you ask the Continue reading →