H Duderstadt, New Tech Maven

In this time of severe budget cuts, public schools are facing serious challenges in how to save money, not the least of which is determining which classes to cut.  As a public school teacher who taught Animation & Video Game Design for several years, I know first hand how the ever shrinking pool of money available is driving schools to drop those classes which are not considered necessities to their children being prepared for college or a career and may not have the enrollment numbers to justify them.   The classes eliminated can range from art, drama and music to career and technical education, to even the “gold standard” AP classes.

A huge problem with doing this is that many schools suffer from a severe lack in elective courses that students need to graduate.  By cutting back on the often limited number of courses that any student can take, schools risk an an increased dropout rate for those borderline students who often don’t qualify for AP classes or even more advanced pupils finding ever more difficult to get enough units to graduate.

One potential solution to this problem is to change the way we approach K-12 learning and how to offer a broad range of classes (both in terms of content and even methods of teaching) to a broad range of students at a variety of levels.  Traditionally, larger schools have benefited in their ability to offer a much larger number of classes on a broad range of subjects.  Where as a school like the one I currently teach for may be able to offer 4 years of Art, or Drama, or Music along with a dizzying array of AP classes and career and technical ed programs; small schools like the high school I attended (with a graduating class of 92) can only offer the core courses simply because there aren’t enough kids to fill the sections and so justify hiring a teacher and paying for the materials to teach the classes.  Of course, the budget crisis I mentioned earlier is now driving this problem up to larger schools as well.

The problem is that we still are limited by the idea that in order for a class to be available to a student, the school they attend must offer it.  Even if you take the approach that many ROP vocational programs take of having regional centers where kids can drive (or be bussed),  you are still limited by distance.  If the number of students, even in a region, who will sign up for a program is too few, the program cannot be justified.  The heart of the problem is that we still focus on PHYSICAL classes.   We need to open our minds to VIRTUAL ones.

Already, there are kids who take online courses in order to complete enough units to graduate or prepare for an AP test that will help them get into a college that looks at AP scores.  But, this number is still relatively small because school counselors and administrators often overlook online programs as a viable option.  Additionally, the students often are unaware and of them, and then, when they actually take  a class, fail because they are unfamiliar with just HOW to take an online class, get the most our of it, and get the best grade.

What if a public school suffering from severe budget cuts were to create several computer labs and staff them with student teachers in order to support online learning?   And, their counselors had a complete list of programs and had worked with the schools that operate them to schedule students regularly into them?

What I’m speaking of here is to take a modular approach to learning.  Instead of trying to offer everything in one school, a district, or county, or even state education department could  coordinate a broad range of online and blended (combining online learning with lab support) across dozens if not hundreds of schools.  Initially, you could utilize the multimedia of university, community college, and even private programs available.   But, a K-12 school that had a program that was particularly successful could could take that class online and offer it to schools across the region, state, or even nationally.  Students would benefit in that they would have an amazing array of classes available.

There are hurdles in schools actually developing their own online courses, not the least of which is state requirements that fund programs based on “seat time” or Average Daily Attendance (ADI).  In essence, unless there is a student in a seat for a particular number of hours, they will not help cover it’s cost.   The Florida Virtual School faced this problem.  State politicians succeeded in changing the requirements to RESULT BASED rather than TIME BASED.  So, as long as the students learned the required content, the cost was covered by the state.

Additionally, there are the technological and course development requirements for online learning.  But, one of the most powerful and popular online learning systems, Moodle, is FREE.  And, as professional instructional designers and those with online learning degrees struggle with the current economy, there are people out there who can help develop such programs.

Kids in school love to complain about how boring so many subjects they have to study are.  “Why do I have to learn Trigonometry anyway???  It’s so BOOOORING!”   Or, “our physics teacher was going on and on about gravity and I just don’t get it.”

Yet, ask them about the latest video game they are playing and their whole mood will change as they start going on and on about how many zombies they were able to kill in Left 4 Dead, or how they built this amazing house in Sims 3 and wished they could really live there.   The two might appear to have nothing in common but you’d be suprised.

Take a look at the typical video game boys in particular like to play and you’ll find a real world complete with many of the same  properties a real world has, INCLUDING GRAVITY.  In fact, there is a game known as Garry’s Mod which is called a “physics sandbox”.  It’s basically an environment where the laws of physic exist and you can create things that are influence by this.  A walking house; a tank you can drive around, an whole army that you can control, even electrical circuits that control specific machines.  Imagine a virtual place where children can build anything they can imagine and then operate it as if it’s in the real world.  The potential of this program in an educational environment is immense.

The possibilities go on and on.  If this is something that excites you, the best place to start is read James Paul Gee’s work “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition: Revised and Updated Edition“

I’ve been reading a fascinating book, “Teaching for Tomorrow, Teaching Content and Problem Solving Skills” by Ted McCain.   It’s interesting because it focuses on several of the most powerful teaching methods currently starting to see more use.  Namely teaching through a combination of Problems and Projects.  Project based learning is already seeing real growth Instead of using the traditional lecture followed by review followed by test based on the lecture & reading content, in a Problem based environment the students are FIRST given a problem that they must solve.  Then, during the process of solving the problem the instructor RESISTS the urge to help and forces the students to do the research and find the solutions themselves.    An example of using such an approach to teach chemistry would be to tell students they work for the epa and must investigate large fish kills in a river downstream from an abandoned factory.  You explain that tests of water samples have shown large amounts of phenol chloride in the water.  You must determine just what phenol chloride is, why it might kill the fish, where it came from and how you might deal with the problem.   This approach to teaching has shown tremendous benefits, particularly in helping to develop the kind of problem solving skills that children will be able to use their entire lives.

Another popular technique that is often paired with problem based learning is PROJECT based learning.  This is pretty obvious.  Instead of traditional lecture, reading assignment, testing format, students are assigned projects that help them learn the material through the experience of creating.  In Career & Technical Education classes like mine, projects have always been the mainstay.  But, now you’re starting to see them appear in science, math, history, even English.     A favorite idea of mine is to use the same approach director Ken Burns with the Civil War.  You provide students with letters, photos, and other raw materials from soldiers involved in a famous battle then assignment them the task of building a presentation about that battle and the experiences of those involved and it’s importance.  Take it a step further and you could even bring in a local resident who was involved and let the students interview them and tape it.  The whole I idea here is to push beyond the specific subject in the class and help to develop their Digital Literacry or , more accurately, Digital Communications skills.

Finally, there’s the use of teams.  In my current course, I have divided the class into teams and have the teams work together to create content for the class.  Studies have shown that in college, students who create study groups do better than those who “go it alone”.  Though there is always the concern that a student won’t “carry their weight”, usually group dynamics  can fight this.  And, with online social network systems seeing more and more use in education, the ability for students to continue working outside of school gives this idea a lot of potential.  In my classes, I get the chance to watch “team” work in more ways than just the creation of game levels.  My students prefer multi-player games over single player.  The result is that they are often working as teams to “take out” the other team.  Certainly, it’s easy to see how one might be concerned that the students are working together to kill a bunch of zombies or terrorists, but the team approach they take actually can be applied to a broad range of areas.

There’s a lot more information out on these various means of teaching.  Find below a list of hyperlinks.  But, take it from me, they all show tremendous promise as we try to adapt and “reinvent” learning for these 21st century learners.

1. http://pbl-online.org/
2. http://www.usc.edu/hsc/dental/ccmb/usc-csp/Quikfacts.htm
3. http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Problem-Based_Learning_in_Middle_and_High_School
4. http://www.google.com/

Here’s a fascinating article from Eschoolnews on how the “I-generation” require a different approach to instruction.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2010/04/12/author-igeneration-requires-a-different-approach-to-instruction/

You might think I am a typical “EdTech” evangelist who believes that technology is the “Holy Grail” of  our education system.  Transforming every classroom into a digital nirvana of state of the art computers with high speed Internet access,  handing out iPads instead of textbooks, requiring all teachers to put their curriculum online are all things I should be a advocate for claiming they will turn around the problems we face our schools.   But, you may be shocked to learn that I don’t believe anything of the sort.  Yes, I do NOT believe that technology is the answer to the United State’s long suffering education system.

Now, before you brand me as some kind of a Luddite who wants to take schools back to the days of one room school houses with blackboards and school marms (though I did like the idea of a one room school house…more on that some other time).  I DO believe that technology, and the tools it represents, is a KEY part of solving our problems.  It’s just that it alone won’t necessarily help.

To better explain this, let’s take a trip back to the 1990′s when the dot com revolution was raging and everybody believed that the Internet was the future.  A group of very dedicated network experts and technologists started a program called “Net Day”.  I had several friends who were a part of this.  The goal of Net Day was to bring together technology experts to wire public schools with high speed internet access using fiber optic cable, the latest in networking technologies, and a whole bunch of volunteers who worked in schools all across the country.  It wasn’t a bad idea.  It was a very good one.  But, in the end many of those high speed lines just made teacher’s lives harder than easier and teaching more difficult that effective.  A lot of the reason was  whether teachers were trained in just what to do with all this data they had access.  Certainly, there were those who had a good understanding of the internet and were able to see a dramatic improvement in their student learning with the connectivity that Net Day brought.  But, there were many more who ended up having to shut off the computers and even unplug them as kids started doing what kids do when they get around computers.  They’d start trying to visit web sites they shouldn’t, and they’d play games.  In the end, some rooms even had the computer removed and how have these weird connectors in the corner where the fiber optic cable came in.  Don’t get me wrong, Net Day was definitely not a flop.  It actually did a lot of good.  In fact, link to Project Tomorrow and you’ll see it’s still going strong.  But, there’s a tendency to embrace a technology just because you are caught up in the excitement about it without really thinking out how it is going to be used and making sure the teacher using it knows what to do with it.

So, there are many wonderful technologies that could improve learning in our schools.  From hand held devices such as iPads to video games to blogs, there are an amazing array of wonderful things out there that we should give serious thought to using.   And, in this blog I’ll talk about a lot of them.  We just must make sure we don’t forget the teachers who will be using it, and ignore the potential downsides so that we can prevent these from hurting their very real potential.

In the end, heck yes I am pro-educational technology.  But, I’m also pro knowing what do, how do it RIGHT and what the results will be before you commit to it.