Getting Others on Board

If it were up to us and our administration, our students would have 1:1 devices with internet access provided at home. All of us know that many low achieving schools have been able to turn everything around by providing technology access to students. Revere High School, for example, changed from a low performing school to one of the highest achieving schools in Massachusetts in only two years by making such implementations, according to Dr. Lourenco Garcia's "A Working Model for Blended Learning in an Urban School."

However, it's not just providing the devices that could cause this kind of change. Revere High School realized this. In addition to providing 1:1 devices for students, they also adopted blended learning, and ensured that each of their teachers is trained and certified to do it. According to Garcia, “Adopting a blended learning environment requires taking a holistic look at the entire school community -- students, teachers, staff, and parents -- and making changes that allow each of these groups to buy into the shift.”

The real difference was convincing everyone-- teachers, students, parents, and support staff--to get on board with the decision. Right now, this isn't exactly happening at our school. Some teachers implement technology whenever possible; the 6th grade science team frequently has students demonstrate their learning by creating PowToons and presenting them to their classmates; the 6th grade social studies team runs Edmodo to allow students and parents with internet access to see what is happening in their classrooms; other teams in different grade levels are also making strides to integrate more blended learning into their curriculum. Administration tries to mandate technology use at every opportunity; our department and the math department must use Holt McDougal Online during our weekly computer lab time (which is actually a decent resource), but they don’t believe any other resource is worth our time. Of course students want to use technology whenever they are allowed to (even though it's usually not for educational purposes). My students constantly ask me if they can use the computer for the approved games when they are finished with their regular work. However, we don't have the resources to implement 1:1, and we also don't have the resources to provide internet access at home to provide a flipped classroom, like Revere High School did, so we run into problems when it comes to getting parents on board, as well as integrating technology use outside of the classroom.

This doesn't mean that we can't still encourage a change among our own team and among our own students. We have on-school resources, similar to Revere's "Learning Commons" (although we just call ours the "Media Center") that could allow us to increase our students' use of technology and our own use of blended learning. Many students already go to the Media Center before school and at lunch to do Teenbiz. The Media Center also has two other computer labs which, although booked each day, are not being used outside of regular school hours. Why can't we use this same resource most students are already familiar with to encourage our students to access our learning platform outside of the classroom? We might have to put in a bit of time before school or during lunch to facilitate (after all, she cannot be in each of the three labs all the time), but the resources are there if we are willing to ask and put in the time. If we would only let the Media Specialist know what we wanted, I'm sure she would jump on board.

As I have said before, we can no longer allow our limitations to dictate our students' success. We know that access to online or blended learning is important today. We may not have the best and most advanced resources, but we do have resources, and more importantly, we have a staff that really wants the best for our students. If we never ask for help, it will never happen. We need to be willing to take some chances and ask for what we need. We just might get it.

Digital Natives or Digital Immigrants: Does It Really Matter?

Our students have been born into a digital world. They have never even known a world without the internet. Many of them have (and frequently get caught with in class) smartphones and can zoom around their apps with ease. However, are our students digital natives or digital immigrants? This tends to be the assumption with this age group, but is it the case with our students in particular?

The theory of digital natives vs. digital immigrants was first proposed by Marc Prensky in his essay “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” in 2001 and it is still a relevant concept today. In this essay, Prensky’s argument forms around this concept: “Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.” This is incredibly true. Today’s students are nothing like the students we were or the students who came before us. They are part of the instant-gratification world where everything is available at the click of a button (or now the press of a button on a screen). According to Prensky, “Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV).” This is an accurate description of our kids, who would rather play Minecraft on their phones than sit in our classes and listen or wait for the movie to come out than actually read a book!

I would argue that although our students really enjoy technology, most of them are not natives to the digital world. They don’t know how to safely search the internet. They have difficulty navigating new websites and resources. For most of them, their smartphone is the only way for them to access the internet because their parents do not have access at home, let alone own a computer. Several of our students don’t have the privilege of the smartphone either. Our students are even less experienced with technology than we are, as this year is the first time they have been required to use it for educational purposes. Most of our kids can navigate an app, but this does not make them digital natives. However, this does not necessarily make them digital immigrants either, as they possess many of the characteristics of digital natives and digital immigrants described by Prensky in his essay.

Whether we wish to characterize our students as digital natives or digital immigrants is not really the important issue. The issue is this: How do we facilitate digital wisdom in our students regardless of their starting point? The main key in facilitating digital wisdom in students of any age or technological skill is to keep our students in mind. What do our students need to be able to learn and understand the material we need to teach them? The best way to find out is to ask them! Even though our students are quite young, they have educational needs and opinions about how best to fill those needs. No, not every student will be able to give us an intelligent (or even a serious) answer, but if we take the time to talk to them, we can find out some really incredible things. The best way to teach a concept might not always be the most technological way.

Another important way to facilitate digital wisdom is to think about the skills that our students will actually need in their futures. Is it really important that they know the names of the different types of figurative language? Do they need to understand the vocabulary of the parts of a sentence? The answer is probably no. However, do they need to understand the difference between literal language and figurative language and when it is appropriate to use each? Do they need to know how to put together a complete sentence with an intelligent thought? These questions will give you very different answers.

If we can focus on only the most important things when we are designing and teaching, we can help our students to make huge leaps, not only with technology, but also in our content area. We must always stop to ask ourselves these questions: What do our students really need to know? and What would be the best way to transmit that information? We need to accept that the digital route is not always the best route, and sometimes taking the best route will require us to address our own digital accents to help our students begin to navigate this digital world that will not be going away.

Microlectures

There are many different ways to teach in an online setting. We have become experts in the resources available in our textbook’s website; already created tutorials, video resources, self-monitored quizzes, etc. Because of our use of Teenbiz, we have already seen the value of badges and gamification for our students as well. However, one thing our team has yet to discover is microlectures.

According to Educause's "Seven Things You Should Know About Microlectures" (2012), microlectures are basically short video or audio lectures that are recorded and usually posted to a Learning Management System, Youtube, or another host. Because microlectures are very short, they should focus on one very narrow topic. Microlectures can be used for online, blended, or classroom instruction with great success. In my opinion, the coolest part about microlectures is that students can pause, rewind, or watch the video as many times as necessary to grasp the information discussed.

These short video/audio lectures would be a great resource for us for many reasons:

• Because our students have such short attention spans, microlectures could be just the thing to transmit to students the information they need without maxing out their attention. According to David Vawter’s “Mining the Middle School Mind” (2009), “We now know that, between the ages of 11 and 15, the brain destroys more than 20 percent of all previously built connections.” This is the main reason why middle schoolers have such a difficult time staying on task. Microlectures are great for catching a very short attention span, especially since they are very short themselves.
• Since we all plan together, we could divide and conquer like we do for many other student resources, with each of us creating or finding microlectures on different topics for our students and then sharing with each other. As we already know, this can decrease the workload significantly.
• With microlectures, our students who have internet access at home or those who have smart phones could re-watch and review the information in the lectures whenever they wanted or needed to as long as we put them into an Online Learning Module like Edmodo (which I know is school approved!).
• Lastly, and probably most importantly, we have a large transient population. We have students coming in and out of our classrooms practically weekly. Microlectures would be a great way to allow these new students (or absent students) to catch up on material that they missed without using precious class time to reteach something that most students were there for and understood the first time. We can simply sit the student or students down at one of our classroom computers and have them watch the microlecture they need to catch them up. We can also do this same thing to remediate if only a few students did not get it the first time.

Introduction

We cannot continue to allow our limited resources to dictate our students' use of technology. In our language arts classes, we can see the difference between those with and those without in not just digital literacy, but problem solving, research, and literacy skills as well. We need to face the facts; we work in an inner city middle school. Our school district will never decide we are important enough to get the best and newest technology available to them. Our community will probably never decide that we need 1-1 technology enough to fundraise to make it happen. Many, if not most, of our students do not have Internet access at home. This does not mean that we give up on using it. There are ways around our obstacles and we have to overcome them. Our students are depending on us.

Just about every career or job involves the use of some kind of technology. Most minimum wage jobs involve running at least one computer program or app. Even many farming jobs involve using some technology. At the student level, many schools require students to complete some form of distance education during their career. Understanding and using technology is becoming more and more important, and the technological divide is wider than ever. We know that better than anyone. Students who do not have Internet access at home and also do not get the quality practice in school will not be prepared to enter the job market. That's all there is to it.

We can sit around and dream about the technology we would like to see our students using, but most of these dreams will never come true. Yes, it would make life easier if our students had internet access at home. Yes, it would be wonderful if they could take home laptops and wireless cards. Yes, I would love it if we could go completely paperless and do all lessons in a digital format. Although we (and our school administrators) wish this was possible, the resources simply aren't there. Let’s stop having this conversation and start having a more productive one: what we can do about the situation, rather than what we wish we could do.

Therefore we must find a way to give our students the practice with online learning that they desperately need while they are at school. We know that our students are getting enough practice to pass the state tests. The district made sure of that by implementing online textbook resources that mirror the format of the test. But we have to remember what our real job is; we are not here to get our kids through the tests. We are here to lead them through childhood and help them begin to navigate their way to adulthood, and in this century, adulthood will most definitely involve distance learning. It might take a little more innovation, a little more knowledge of the resources available to us, and a little more effort, but it is what our students need to be competitive when they grow up, so it is what we must do. In this blog, I will discuss best practices for creating successful online learning modules for our students, ideas for incorporating distance learning inside the classroom, as well as how to give our students opportunities to access the online learning community outside of our classrooms.