Technology Training - What's the point?

If excellent teacher's can teach without technology, what's the point of technology training?

Newspapers didn't appear to see it coming - who really could imagine people writing for free, and then attracting enough readers to hurt newspapers? Blogs offered a way that anyone could voice their opinion, and while the criticism that 'everyone' means that the bulk of blogs are inadequate, self-indulgent or unprofessional may be true, it misses the point entirely. People don't read all blogs, they read a limited number. As an almost evolutionary process, the good (or at least the readable) are sorted from the bad, and the critique now looks a bit weak - the blogs people read frequently exceed the quality of newspaper articles in knowledge, depth, understanding or entertainment. Unlike newspapers, blogs also allow the readership to comment, inform, correct and even chastise the author. This is not arguing that blogs are "better" either. Blogs simply out-compete newspapers in many traditional newspaper niches where it matters - readers.

This has a lot to do with education. When I started teaching schools still required many traditional teaching supplies: textbooks, pens, paper, chalkboard, desks, etc. The generational difference between teachers seemed one of form rather than function - I kept my grades, lesson plans, lessons and notes on a computer, other teachers used planners, agendas, and binders. We were still, however, doing the 'same thing' in many respects. The new environment, however, is new in function as well as form. Seven million (full text) books are available through Google Books. Wikipedia is the world's largest, and most current, encyclopedia. iTunes has iTunes U and YouTube has YouTube Edu, both of which offer lectures by professors. In many cases textbooks no longer need to be purchased for class. Films, examples, and demos can be viewed without a video or DVD, and for free. The quality can be equal to (or superior) to purchased items in many areas. Alternative lectures of the topics I'm covering in class are widely and freely available. Facebook, Myspace, and now Twitter have changed how we share, communicate and collaborate.

Experimenting with videos and digitizing class notes creating some video's of class topics has made for some interesting insights.

For example, some YouTube author has created a video entitled Parts of the Brain. It's not great, and is mostly just a dry re-statement of the parts with a diagram to show where the parts are located. Despite that, they've received a modest number of views (2000+), and some favorable comments. The conclusion to this anecdote is not that we should be providing/creating YouTube videos to our students. The conclusion is that soon, if not already, there will be available to our students resources that specifically engage them, as a unique individual, to learn a particular topic. One student commented "Thank you so much for being the kind of instructor that I'm paying for and NOT RECEIVING!!!", which highlights the issue directly. Although the videos may not be good, they did meet the needs of specific individual students. Given the ever-expanding amount of resources available, at some point resources that cater to an individual's learning style will be easily available. Using generalized teaching methods geared to a 'class' seem inadequate. As the encounter between blogs and newspapers demonstrated, people prefer to choose what works for them, rather than accepting what works for most.

So what, exactly, am I providing in the classroom that's not available elsewhere for free?

Many students walk into school with an impressive amount of computing power. When helping a student after class we had a disagreement about what I had taught. She consulted her iPhone, had the class notes downloaded and double-checked. She also had the review website I had suggested bookmarked, as well as several educational videos. Yet, with this impressive demonstration of resources, she was sitting on a couch in the common room, working over chemistry problems with her teacher, in her free time. No amount of Twitter, email, or virtual resources is enough to replace the basic need for a teacher/student mentor relationship.

While blogs may be causing problems for the New York Times, some magazines that have embraced the new technology (Discover, Seed) are flourishing. It appears to me that the NYT used the web as an extension of their newspaper, but Discover and Seed used blogs themselves to offer something different from their magazine. I don't know if it will work in the long run, but in the short run it has been much more successful.

New technology doesn't replace teachers, but it does shift how we might think about teaching. It seems that many of the teaching methods I still use, and was taught, were invented in a time when the student environment was resource poor. Much like the NYT, simply shifting what we do on paper to doing the same thing with technology is only one evolutionary step. Of more pressing importance is how to change the nature of teaching itself so that it keeps what still works, and adapts what does not to the new environment. For example, one twitter user pointed me to an article in which a college professor no longer gives lectures (no link, sorry). All of the class time is devoted to giving extra help and tutorial help, going over common mistakes, or hands-on learning opportunities. Rather than assigned homework, lectures are assigned, so that students are expected to show up having listened and made notes on the next days topic. As an adaptation to a resource rich environment, this seems intriguing. Unfortunately, as with all adaptations, whether or not it will be ultimately successful is uncertain.

An online poll asked "Can a teacher be a good teacher without using technology?". I think it unsurprising that the majority answered "Yes". The purest form of university I've ever heard defined is as a log, with a teacher at one end, and a student at the other. The follow-up question, “Is a teacher, who is not using technology (computer, internet, etc.) doing his or her job?” resulted in a rather emphatic "No".

If I am not providing my students with resources they can easily access, and if I'm not providing a learning environment where individualized resources from outside are encouraged and utilized, I am not serving the needs of my students. By today's standards, I risk becoming the New York Times - not quite good enough. The environment has changed enough, particularly in today's economic climate, that what schools and teachers evolution will eliminate is not entirely clear. It is never enough to be the best, as what's 'best' depends on the environment, a variable that appears to change more quickly with each passing year.

We have started a technology initiative, and I was compared (favorably I think) to a Bulldog in terms of herding it along. I thought a bit of explanation might be in order. The purpose of the initiative is not to learn a 'thing', like a tablet, a specific set of programs that can improve what we do in the classroom, or even new teaching methods. Its purpose is to take excellent teachers, and help create more familiarity with the environment, and provide more opportunities to learn technology. If this means that no new technology 'things' are used in the classroom, then that's fine. Being able to critically assess and experiment with new technology - adjust to the changing environment, as it were - will be more important in the long run than simply learning a new 'thing'.

Two quotes from Tom Whitby from Twitter:

"I have tunnel vision when I do tech training. I apprch it with 1 Ques: How can this help kids learn? If I can't use it I don't learn it."

"If teachers employ the technology to teach there would be less of a need to teach technology. "

While there are a great many resources out there and a great many excellent teachers with tips on how to use those resources, I do not see a consensus or agreement on what approaches are necessarily 'good'. I certainly can't claim that I've discovered any amazing way to help students learn more, or faster. The more of us there are looking, collaborating, testing and experimenting, however, the better the chance the environment can be harnessed rather than just waiting to see what evolution does. As is common with a changing environment, there seems to be a great many ideas about how to best capitalize the new resources, and it's certain that a great many of them will turn out to be wrong in addition to a great many of the traditional resources and methods. If there's one thing biologists know about evolution, it's that it's not very kind to the individual species participating. Unlike organisms, however, we have the advantage of being a bit more Lamarkian about this process, borrowing, adapting, and changing on the fly as successful strategies are proven. If you're not, however, learning the technology you don't have that advantage - and are subject to a more Darwinian form of elimination.

And that's the reason I think technology training is a serious issue.

Cheers,

Ron Neufeld
Canada's Best Boarding School