ID Meets IT Part 12: Learning Objects and Repositories

My first reaction, or association rather, when watching the presentation on learning objects was the site Learn NC, an online collection of learning resources aimed at NC Educators. While perhaps not the best example of an online repository of learning objects, Learn NC is a fairly extensive collection of not only lessons and articles related to North Carolina teaching standards, but also contains a decent collections of what could be considered "learning objects", or rather digital resources that could be used to facilitate learning. In a sense, learning objects remind me of set of Legos in that they can be selected and used to for a variety of purposes based on the designs of the creator. Ideally, an instructional designer could locate a number of these learning Legos related to a given topic and create a meaningful lesson from them in much the same way my fourth graders could magically assemble an rebel X-wing from a seemingly disparate set of plastic blocks. However, as any moderately tech savvy teacher can tell you, and as mentioned by Wiley as a potential paradox with learning objects, is that finding a learning objects that fits your instructional context can be a challenge. On the one hand, if they are general enough to be reusable, their actual use may be quite limited; and if they are specific enough to be useful, they may not be applicable to your instructional context or, more likely, very difficult to locate.  However, if you are able to locate a suitable learning objects, this can save a great deal of time in having to create one yourself.

As an instructor I've used learning objects both online and off. My offline collection of "learning objects" consisted of rack full of plastic bins that contained a variety of content area manipulatives. There were math learning wrap-ups, flash cards, pattern blocks, Cuisenaire  rods,  fraction bars, dice, counters, chips, circuit boards, geoboards, game boards and quite a bit more.  On their own, their instructional value was limited (though the entertainment value for the imaginative was without bound), but combined with a well designed plan, their instructional potential was unlimited. I think that digital learning objects share these characteristics with their offline companions. Stand alone learning objects need a well designed plan to really make use of the instructional potential. I wish I could relay in the next couple of sentences exactly how this is done, but my own experiences utilizing digital learning objects is seems fairly basic compared to what's possible. On our classroom website, I incorporate a number of images, games, clips, etc. into online instructional units, and had a "toolbox" and discussion rooms that contained a set of links to learning objects centered on a given topic, but these objects were used minimally compared to our offline learning objects. This partly due to limited access, and greater experience and ready-made lessons with offline objects.

Fortunately, there are growing number of online resources that make it easier to incorporate digit learning objects into meaningful lessons. For those of you with SMART Boards, the SMART Exchange has become the go to source for everything SMART board. What used to be a chore is... well, honestly is still kind of a chore, but it has made finding resources to use in SMART Board enhanced lessons a little less painful.  Or, if you happen to be Canadian, the Virtual Muesum of Canade --and large scale museum sites in general are great repositories of LOs-- is an amazing collection of potential learning objects related to all things Canada, including, but not limited to, the great Tim Horton of hockey and donut fame. Hopefully, as search engines like Google and Bing begin to leverage our social graph, locating useful learning objects will allow us to rely less on known but lmited repositories like the SMART Exchange and museum websites, use broad search engines like Google to locate very specific and relevant resources to use in our teaching.

ID Meets IT Part 11: Cognitive Flexibility Theory

Cognitive Flexibility Theory seems like a natural fit for learning given how we casually pick up new concepts, knowledge and skills in our everyday environment. For example, my knowledge and gradual acquisition of cooking skills --my wife would probably insist on quotes around that last word-- came from various attempts at cooking, comparison of recipes and techniques over time, reflection on success and failures, and experiences with televisions, books and observation of others. Fortunately, I've had the luxury of learning over a long period of time, with little at stake other than an occasionally burned meal or some very runny cookies (true story). Unfortunately, teachers in the classroom have neither of these luxuries. The several inches thick curriculum guide partitions standards and objectives into months, weeks and even days, and the penalties for failure in teaching and learning of these standards and objectives is growing increasingly harsh. In L.A. you run the risk of having you name published online and being publicly shamed if your students do not meet these standards. In Florida, 50% of your teacher evaluation will be tied to test scores. And in Indiana, your pay may soon depend on it!. Hence, one problem that I see with this method from a classroom and educational institution standpoint is a problem of efficiency. 

It's no secret that our curriculum is a mile wide and and inch deep. From what I understand of CFT, students are asked to explore content in depth, to soak in it, and to get to know the waters. When a 4th grade teacher has roughly 30 broad math objectives to cover in roughly 40 weeks, minus several weeks for testing and test prep, every hour and everyday is required to be as productive as possible and exploration of a wide range of materials in multiple formats will seem like a luxury to most teachers. Each day must be accounted for and each lesson must directly linked to a given standard with an explicit objective that can be measured at the end. On a side note,  I'm reminded of an excellent This American Life Podcast on the closing of an experimental GM/Toyota plant collaboration that tried to buck the traditional assembly methods by focusing on the quality of individual cars over the productivity of the line as measured by the sheer number that passed through and made it to the lot. While production moved more slowly due to the empowerment of workers to stop line when problems were sighted, the vehicles were of much higher quality and resulted in few problems with the cars over the life of the vehicle. In some of the traditional plants, production was moving as such a breakneck speed that employees were repairing new vehicles exiting production on the plant's parking lot, and the number of repairs needed after production by dealers was appallingly high. I think this is a fitting analogy for our for the problem described above and I will allow you to make the connections.

I know I've constantly referred to the application of these models in math and science in previous posts, but I've had the fortunate opportunity to be exposed to excellent programs and training in the math a sciences and I think some of the leaps and bounds made in experiential and contextual-based learning due in large part to the advocacy of great organizations like NCTM and the NSTA. In science, I've used curricular materials from the BCAMSC with units such as Magnetism and Electricity that allow students to explore related concepts through a diversity of investigations, readings, and literature. Although these lessons differ from CFT in structure and the degree of cases involved, I've witnessed first hand the academic and motivational benefits of allowing students to explore a topic in depth, approach it from different angles, and tie together a multitude of experiences to make sense of a problem of phenomenon. I've seen students who enjoyed learning for its own sake, who felt empowered to pursue their own line of reasoning, and who were curious about the material to be learned.


While technology can do little to solve the time/testing dilemma, I do think the Internet has brought he possibility of incorporating CFT within greater reach for the digitally literate teacher. The sheer number of primary source material and instructional videos now accessible online, not to mention quality online educational databases, personal blogs, and powerful search engines, have made gathering and collecting material for CFT possible. The way that software like garage band, movie maker and photoshop brought professional media production within reach of the average person, the resources mentioned above brought the material and tools needed for creating content and resources rich lessons within reach of teachers. 

ID Meets IT Part 10: Case-Based Learning

As pointed out in the lecture, the case-based method appears to have a lot in common with several other contextual-based instructional methods presented in previous weeks. There is the presence of a narrative structure to present content, an emphasis on higher-order thinking skills, and a context anchored in real-world situations.  At the elementary level, case-based instruction as used in secondary and higher education poses a challenge for teachers due to the limited reading skills and the ability of students to follow lengthy narratives. If used on a very small scale, however, it is very useful approach to framing instructional problems. The realistic narrative format can allow student to connect new content and skills to existing knowledge and prior experiences and provide that necessary bridge between the known and unknown.

I’ve often made use of “cases” with my elementary students in the context of math and science instruction. The quotation marks, however, signify that these cases are really small scale versions of what would be considered a normal case. It usually consists of a short paragraph, perhaps two at the most, detailing a semi-realistic situation in which the problem at hand might occur. For example, in mathematics, we might be working on area and perimeter, and the lesson would begin with a short story about a boy and his grandpa interested in building a sandbox, but are limited by the amount of building material and sand that they have.  While a “case” like this doesn’t involve the complexity or amount of embedded content that a true case-study may entail, it does provide a realistic application for the content to be learned. 

I can easily envision MOST environments and case-based scenarios meshing well to provide elementary students with an opportunity to explore more in-depth case studies. While lengthy text-based case studies may be too difficult for students to attend to, providing video or media embedded cases could provide the necessary supports for students to explore them. Although these may take time too much time for a teacher to develop, there are countless video clips and longer videos through sites such as YouTube and United Streaming that are at the teachers disposal.

ID Meets IT Part 9: MOST Learning Environments

On reading Bransford's article about Multimedia environments that Organize and Support Text (MOST), I found it discouraging to realize how little progress we've made in the past 20 years in adapting technology to support the natural reading process of our struggling learners. I've recently worked for several years in a Title I school with a disproportionate number of disadvantaged students, many of whom had reading problems described by Bransford et. al, and who are also subjected to the same decontextualized drills mentioned in the article. What has changed since Bransford's time, however, is that these drills are now packaged and sold as popular "standards-based" software programs (read: isolated practice of basic skills), and this form of remedial instruction is now delivered by computers instead of skilled professionals. The problem with this is best summarized by this excerpt:

Overall, at-risk students receive repetitive instruction on things they do not know—instruction that does not allow them to utilize the rich sources of everyday knowledge that they bring to the classroom (e.g., Palincsar & Klenk, 1991). Knapp and Thrnbull (1990) argued that typical instruction for at-risk students tends to:

• underestimate what disadvantaged students are capable of doing;
• postpone more challenging and interesting work for too long—in some cases, forever; and
• deprive students of a meaningful or motivating context for learning or using skills that are taught.

The solution to this deficit driven approach proposed by Bransford et al. is a little counterintuitive at first glance. Rather than focusing on traditional approaches using oral and written language, the MOST models makes use of "multimedia technologies that allow the interaction of print and oral language with video and audio media." The following passage, short yet powerful, pinpoints the shortcomings of traditional instruction in closing the language gap between at-risk students and their peers: 

Because they are less likely than their developmentally average or advanced peers to understand all the vocabulary used by their teachers and story authors, they are less likely to benefit from purely verbal descriptions of background information, which could help their subsequent comprehension.

The authors argue that the incorporation of multimedia elements not only facilitates the process of conceptual and language development, but the process of learning to read as well.  Unlike the previous models examined, the MOST model provide little in the way of prescriptive practices to be followed by teachers. However, based on a list of features provided by Bransford, it's apparent that the increasing ubiquity of educational technologies in classrooms may already be supporting the inclusion of MOST environments. My elementary school, for example, was fortunate to be provided with a SMART Board for each classroom and this tool alone has done an impressive job supporting MOST environments for the typical classroom teacher. I've know several teachers who have created slideshows with images and video clips to support both narrative and non-fiction texts. At the elementary level, myself and several other teachers have incorporated multimedia infused literature through the use of animated storybooks from sites like Tublebooks. My wife has also used sites like Starfall to embed phonemic awareness activities within the context of a story. Although, these examples are limited, I do believe they demonstrate how even within a traditional classroom setting, tools such as the SMART Board can facilitate the incorporation of multimedia elements to support instruction.

As appealing as the MOST environment is, I see several barriers to widespread and rapid adoption of this approach. The first rests on an assumption brought up by Bransford and one I've seen with a strong foothold among the teachers I've worked with over the years. The assumption is that skills development, including those required for reading, must follow a strict hierarchy from "the basics" to "higher-order thinking". When translated into curriculum, this means that teachers will work with students on basic skill mastery before progressing activities that require more complex thinking, i.e. authentic and likely more engaging activities. Unfortunately, struggling students may spend disproportionate lengths of time working on "the basics" and, as I tend to agree with Bransford, this emphasis on can create misconceptions about the goals of reading, and ultimately turn them off to it altogether is they see books as simply "something you look at and say the words." Another barrier I see to this approach, though I believe there is a misguided logic behind it, is that since reading is achievement is measured entirely through short passages silently read, the MOST model may be seen as technological crutch that students will not be able to rely on when it come time to take the big test. Finally, there is a problem I mentioned in a previous post, and one I feel applies here as well. Designing media rich lessons is beyond the reach of many teachers, and even for the tech savvy teachers it would still be a time consuming process. Perhaps because of the reasons mentioned above, prepacked software programs that focus on isolated skills have become so appealing.

However, I do believe their is hope. While print-based literacy skills and literature will, and should, still have place in contemporary society, much of our print-based environments are already migrating to multimedia ones via the web. Although they require a new set of skills, they are also capable of supporting traditional ones. Reading the news online is not only a potentially more dynamic experience, with embedded video and photo galleries to accompany articles, but is also becoming increasingly common. And the advent of mobile computing through smartphones and tablet devices such the iPad, has made available a countless array of educational apps and storybooks that extend the reading experience beyond static text, allowing not only the support of multimedia elements, but also the creation of products that allow readers and learners to extend the reading experience and connect with others.  Hopefully, with the increasing presence of multimedia environments and rise of mobile computing devices, I think that schools will begin to recognize that our educational standards need to reflect these new literacies and prepare our students, especially for those at risk, to learn from them and with them. Otherwise, I fear, the language gap discussed by Bransford will also be joined by a widening digital divide.


Bransford, J. D., Sharp, D. M., Vye, N. J., Goldman, S. R., Hasselbring, T. S., Goin, L., O'Banion, K., Livernois, J., Saul, E., & the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (1996). MOST Environments for accelerating literacy development. In S. Vosniadou, E. DeCorte, R. Glaser, & H. Mandl (Eds.), International perspectives on the design of technology-supported learning environments (pp. 223-255). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

ID Meets IT Part 8: STAR Leagcy

If Anchored Instruction (AI) and PSI were to meet at college during their student teaching year, fall in love and have a brief yet passionate engagement, wed shortly after at the Alumni Chapel on campus and later give birth to a bouncing baby girl, that child would be named STAR Legacy. Her father, AI, has passed down to her his love of expertise, tackling real-world problems, and spinning a good yarn. Her mother, on the other hand, shares her independence, her desire for structure, and a belief that action speaks louder than words.


Family metaphors aside, the STAR (Software Technology for Action and Reflection) Legacy model presents a middle ground between between two instructional models at opposite ends of the design continuum. As with Anchored Instruction, STAR shares the instructional philosophy that learning should be contextualized within "meaningful, if not authentic, tasks". Content is often presented by "experts" in the field through video or audio recordings, and within an evolving narrative that follows a set of individuals as the work their way through the "challenge" they encountered. As with the PSI, STAR follows a linear, though cyclical, format and learners are consciously aware of where exactly they are in the learning process.  The figure below shows the components of the STAR process.

As was intended with its creation, the STAR "shell" was designed to be a flexible format with room for adaption to meet the needs of the teachers and students within their local context and implementation can vary. For instance, STAR as laid out by Schwatz incorporates the use of collaborative learning and provides perspectives and resources for completing tasks primarily outside of the STAR shell similar to PBL. STAR as implemented through modules on Vanderbilt's Iris Center website, however, follows take a PSI model approach with students working through modules independently, and as in AI, resources for solving problems are embedded primarily within the module, at least from those that I sampled. Regardless of the implementation, STAR still has it's roots in problem-based learning with the unique contribution of a legacy component, the creation of projects or products by students to be left behind for the next generation of learners.

According to Schwartz, the purpose of this approach is to:

teach a deep understanding of disciplines-while simultaneously fostering the skills of problem solving, collaboration. and communication-through the use of problem-based learning followed by more open-ended project-based learning.

As mentioned in a previous post, "aside from from the inquiry and problem-solving skills gained by placing an emphasis on learning as a process, students of PBL have also demonstrated deeper understanding and retention of content, increased motivation and teamwork skills." I've also mentioned in a blog posting on AI the potential for increased motivation resulting from immersing students in a complex problem that allows them to creatively solve more open-ended problems, while also fostering critical skills that are given a lot of lip service in education, but take a back seat to knowledge and skills that are easily measured by standardized tests.

While I have little experience with the STAR model specifically, the components of the model align almost directly with Gagne's nine instructional events and these I have considerable experience with as an educator. In fact, most of the models in this series incorporate these events in some fashion and differ primarily in how they present the content (event 4), provide "learning guidance (event 5), and elicit performance (event 6). Although I have little experience with this approach, I have used a mathematics program that frequently makes use of problem-based learning. In fact, two years ago I served on the textbook adoption committee for math and was able to help sway the committee in adopting a program called NSF funded program called Investigations that frequently makes use of the approaches discussed in the past few posts. A number of units in this series are prolonged "investigations" that are anchored to a particular situation or problem. One unit in particular was an extended study of the differences in heights between 1st and 4th graders which the students found especially engaging.

I've already mentioned several drawbacks to these contextualized approaches in previous posts, so in this post I want explore the difficulties we encountered with our first year of implementation of Investigations. As with any new program, Investigations was received with skepticism by many, and even disdain by a few.  As dramatically different is the PSI model from Anchored Instruction or Problem-Based Learning, so was the difference between Investigations and our previous Houghton Mifflin math text. From a teacher standpoint, it was a giant shift in how instruction was delivered. The older series was a teacher-centered approach with each lesson throughout the entire text following the exact same format of sample problem, teacher modeling of correct method for solving the problem, guided practice and then individual practice. Teachers had grown comfortable and some even successful with this approach, so implementing an approach that focused on group work, student solutions and problem solving over computational fluency was a difficult change. If teachers had difficulty adapting, it's not surprising that students did as well. My 4th grade students that came to me had very little experience working cooperatively and learning from classmates, and previous years of "correct" solutions and standard algorithms led to a sort of intellectual dependency on the teacher making creative problem solving and independent thinking very difficult for students. While these difficulties are confined to very specific setting and situation, I would imagine that implementing a problem-based approach like STAR at any level would pose similar problems for teachers and students.

In previous posts I've discussed ways in which technology can enhance these older models and bring them into the digital fold.  Returning to the analogy from the beginning, if PSI and AI are the "digital immigrants" of instructional technology family, then the STAR model is a "digital native" having been conceived and brought up in a digital world.  As demonstrated in the STAR modules from Vanderbilt, this model has been adapted to utilize the multimedia potential of the online environment. Each model is rich with text, image, audio, and video content, is easily navigable with links, and includes a wealth of material that would be nearly unmanageable in a physical format. But STAR, at least as presented at the Iris Center, is clearly starting to show her age. STAR Legacy is static and isolated and represents the height of instructional technology circa 1999. What it needs to bring about the full conception of the model as presented by Schwartz is an infusion of social media and web 2.0 tools for creation, communication, and collaboration. While re-imagining STAR in light of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wordpress, Zynga and the like is beyond the scope of this post, its not difficult to envision STAR as part of a dynamic network of online learners working together to share perspectives, collaborate on solutions, and create legacies of their learning for next set of learners.


Schwartz, D., Lin, X., Brophy, S., & Bransford, J. D. (1999). Toward the development of flexibly adaptive instructional designs. In C. M. Reigeluth (Ed.), Instructional design theories and models (2nd ed., pp. 183-214). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

ID Meets IT Part 7: Anchored Instruction

Arising from a desire to situate learning within a context mirroring the actual world students inhabit, early educational thinkers and doers such as Dewey and Gragg made the case for anchored instruction as an alternative to the rote memorization and recall of isolated facts and principles typical of the 1940's classroom. Unlike the traditional educational approach of passive absorption by pupils followed by the parroting of expected behaviors, Anchored Instruction (AI) requires students to work in small groups to tackle problems that experts in any given area might encounter. 

Like Goal-Based Scenarios and Problem-Based Learning, AI consist of students working in groups to solve authentic, and often complex problems set within a narrative backdrop. AI also shares some characteristics of the apprenticeship model in that "experts" in a given field are called upon to serve as models and to guide learning. What sets AI apart from these other approaches, however, is that facts and information need to solve problems are carefully embedded within instruction so that independent research in unnecessary. Solutions to problems are also less open-ended and the "expert" guidance found in the apprenticeship model is simulated, though as realistically as possible.

As one might expect when straying from the traditional instructional path, the implementation of AI in a K-12 classroom setting poses some problems for the practitioner. As Goldman et al. point out, the contexts in which instruction is anchored may span weeks and even months. For the teacher in a typical classroom, spending weeks or even months on a given problem might indeed be a fruitful endeavor, but is unrealistic given the pacing guides and content coverage required of most teachers. While it might be possible for a very creative teacher to weave the content to be covered into meaningful whole, this would likely be a very time consuming and difficult process for a teacher who already spends what little time they have not working directly with students filling out paperwork or attending professional development or meeting in PLCs to help struggling students. Aside from curricular conundrums, supporting the diverse range of students needs, monitoring the progress of not only student groups but the individuals within them, and providing feedback and support in this dynamic context could overwhelm even the most experienced of teachers.

Despite these challenges, research has suggested that while the achievement of factual knowledge was shown to be on par with students in traditional classroom settings, conceptual understanding, transfer of knowledge and application of information may be better over both the short and long term. But aside from the potential achievement gains, I believe there is an important motivational and affective component that comes from immersing students in an authentic situation with exposure to solving real problems that take time and expertise. Sadly, there are very few "problems" that we don't expect student to be able to solve by the end of hour long lesson. I believe part of this stems from the very narrow focus in our schools on standards and objectives that are expected to be obtained by students by a very precise date. While there are many praiseworthy standards written into our every state's grade level curriculum, not every standard is easily measurable and therefor not subject to testing. I can recall several staff meetings in which we were given a breakdown on the percentage of the test that each standard represents and therefor which standards to devote time to. Unfortunately, important objectives such as these, behaviors often touted as much needed 21st century skills and that are vital to producing competent and curious life-long learners, are too difficult to assess on a multiple choice test and, sadly, are rarely emphasized as a result:

• 1.06 Read independently daily from self-selected materials (consistent with the student's independent reading level)
• 3.04 Make informed judgments about television and film/video productions.
• 3.06 Conduct research for assigned projects or self-selected projects (with assistance) from a variety of sources through the use of technological and informal tools (e.g., print and non-print texts, artifacts, people, libraries, databases, computer networks).
• 4.03 Make oral and written presentations using visual aids with an awareness
  of purpose and audience
• 4.04 Share self-selected texts from a variety of genres (e.g., poetry, letters,
  narratives, essays, presentations).

While I would love to boast that I have used AI to the extent outlined by Goldman, I'm afraid my science instruction (and other content areas for that matter) has fallen more in line with inquiry-based methods that lack the narrative backdrop and extended focus. While I try provide problems and learning experiences that provide the necessary scaffolds to allow children to arrive at a solution or learning goal through a route that makes sense to them, as Goldman points out, this only represents a small part of expert practice.


Fortunately, I do see technology playing a role in easing the process for educators interested in implementing anchored instruction. As video has played such a major role in the past of providing the AI stroyline and simulating interaction with experts in the field, the ubitquity of video sources courtesy of the Internet (both freely available form sites such as YouTube or behind paid wall like Discovery's United Streaming) provides teachers with easy access to resources to fit virtually any problem. In addition, the explosion of online collaboration tools make it even easier for students to address the objectives listed above. Although I feel that technology may easy the process, the added role of instructional designer that a teacher would have to take on places too great a burden on an already demanding job. I believe for educational approaches like these to really become a part of the teacher's repertoire, those responsible for the development and/or selection of curricular materials will have play a larger role.

Goldman, S.R., Petrosino, A.J., Sherwood, R.D., Garrison, S., Hickey, D., Bransford, J. D., & Pellegrino, J.W. (1996). Anchoring science instruction in multimedia learning environments. In S. Vosniadou, E. De Corte, R. Glaser, & H. Mandl (Eds.), International perspectives on the psychological foundations of technology-based learning environments (pp. 257-284). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Eribaum. 

Pichert, J. W., Snyder, G. M., Kinzer, C. K., & Boswell, E. J. (1994). Problem solving anchored instruction about sick days for adolescents with diabetes. Patient Education and Counseling, 23(2), 115-124. doi:10.1016/0738-3991(94)90049-3 

Voices Behind the Visions

The 2020 visions of our students clearly bring into focus the views our student have about technology and education. And I think with a little imagination we could even use their visions to create something akin to a photo mosaic of what the classroom of 2020 might look like. A classroom where where every student has a small portable computer that allows them to read text, link to media rich databases, collaborate with peers, engage in stimulating environments, and access learning at any time, place or pace. However, I think if we look beyond the visions, and listen rather to the voices of 2020, we will hear something even more significant. We will hear that our students are not really asking for technology gadgets and gizmos, they are asking for the tools, opportunities, support and change that our schools are failing to provide.

A New Tool

The visions of 2020 show us that children want devices that are small, portable, convenient, and easy to use: a single thin book-size computer, for example, that allows them to access all kinds of media formats and resources with a single device. One that can be used effortlessly to record and communicate ideas and be carried around for instant access. They are asking for a new tool that will replace the multitude of tools we currently provide such as textbooks, pencils, keyboards, PC’s, draft books, folders, crayons, paper and so on and so forth.

That is what they are showing us, but what are they really telling us? I think if we listen we will hear that they what they really desire is a tool that will remove the barriers to learning created by the multitude of tools they must currently master before they can get to the learning that matters. For instance, in order for our students to learn to efficiently communicate ideas and access information electronically, the must learn the laborious task of learning to type. Or if a student is interested in a subject and desires to learn more, they must first locate the proper book among hundreds of books, sift through its pages for the proper content, and hope that they find what they are looking for. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we should look to technology to replace important literacy skills, but we should being considering how the classrooms of 2020 can use technology can remove unnecessary learning obstacles and get the learning that matters.

Access to Opportunities

Our students also show us visions of technology that will allow every student access to the information they need, when they need it, and the ability to share this information with peers all over the world. They are showing us a school in which technology is not partitioned to a separate wing of the building, or allotted to students at given times of the day in heavily filtered doses of isolated access, but rather technology that is a accessible to anyone,
anytime and anyplace.

What our students are telling us about our schools is that they are failing to provide students with opportunities to utilize a powerful tool for learning. They are telling us that the opportunities we do provide are isolating and limited. They are telling us that they are not happy with their alloted times for restricted computer access. If we are truly listening to the voices of 2020, we would hear that we need to increase access to technology by providing our every student the opportunity to frequently utilize it in ways that will allow them to easily explore, connect, and share.

Just-in-Time Support

The visions of 2020 also show us technology that will be used to support our students in ways that will meet their specific needs at the time when it is most needed. These visions, though often rather fantastical, show us numerous ways that the classrooms of the future can help students on homework, link students with the necessary resources, and provide students with immediate access to resources that will satisfy their curiosity. In the classrooms that
students envision for the year 2020, the support student will need will be available at the click of a button.

Sadly, perhaps more so than any other section of the 2020 report, is that what these voices are telling us if we are only willing to listen, is that our schools are currently failing to provide students with the support they need. They are telling us that students are eager to for feedback and are willing to ask for the help they need, but for whatever reason, overcrowded classrooms or overburdened teachers perhaps, our schools are not providing our students with the one thing that requires no knowledge of technology whatsoever: support, guidance, and feedback. If technology is able to provide this someday, I fear we may all be out of a job.

Learn Different

Apple’s popular slogan, “Think Different” could aptly apply to how students see technology changing how they learn in the future. They see games used for learning, they see virtual field trips to distant lands and distant times, they see learning that requires no physical classrooms, teachers or even books and is tailored to their personal learning styles. They see learning in a completely different way than they learn in a typical school setting. They see
change.

Our students are telling us that our schools need to begin thinking differently if they are going to remain relevant to today’s digital student. They are telling us that this is how we live, this is how we learn and with some changes you can connect learning to our lives in a powerful way we understand. If our schools can learn to adapt, learn to listen and learn to think differently, we too will begin to see the potential for technology to reach today’s students who learn different.

The student visions of 2020 are showing us more than what our students think about the schools of the future. They are telling us what they currently think about the schools of the present. And their voices are loud and clear. They are saying our schools need to remove barriers, expand opportunities, provide support and make some changes. Let us hope that we will begin to listen long before the year 2020 so that the learning students envision today, they will experience in the near future.