Shame of the Nation

 

Jonathon Kozol, National Book Award winning author of Savage Inequalities, once again visits the topic of inequity in America's public schools. Focusing this time on totalitarian teaching methods in urban districts and near apartheid levels of segregation, Kozol examines the growing divide between the haves and have-nots of our public schools and the waning hopes that the levels of desegregation and opportunity once envisioned in former times will one day be achieved.

One shameful and tragic irony that surfaces immediately in Kozol's work, is that to find some of the most segregated and unequal schools, one need only to look for those named after the leaders who fought so hard to against such conditions; leaders such as Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Fannie Lou Hamer. In states such as Michigan, New York, Illinois, and California, once "bastions of progressive thinking" and homes for politically charged social movements, can now be found these same schools where rates of segregation are the highest in the nation.

The disrepair, unequal funding, and lack of basic resources in many of the schools from Savage Inequalities are still present, while new military style instructional methods and prisonesque management techniques have begun to emerge under the name of "urban education." In some instances, a form of classroom eduspeak has been imposed upon the natural language of children reminiscent of Orwell's 1984. And in this new era of No Child Left Behind accountability measures, subjects that are not directly tested on standardized exams have either been marginalized or dismissed entirely in these urban schools.

Thirteen years have passed since Savage Inequalities, yet Kozol's passionate voice continues to speak out loudly for those children whose voices are rarely heard. It continues to remind a nation of shameful truths that have been long been ignored. The true shame of the nation, as Kozol points out, is that "No matter how complex the reasons that have brought us to the point at which we stand, we have, it seems, been traveling a long way to a place of ultimate surrender that does not look very different from the place where some of us began."

Open Classroom 2.0

In the early sixties there was a new movement in education whose principles embodied creativity, collaboration, authenticity, individualism, and openness. Walls and doors were dramatically removed from classrooms so students could communicate with peers of all ages and share resources across the building. Teaching was tailored to individual students as they frequently pursued their own learning interests, worked in the community, and collaborated with peers on self directed learning projects. Teachers shifted their roles from learning directors to learning mentors and spent more time working with students individually and in small groups. This movement was called the Open Classroom. Sadly, the open classroom faded away and as standards-based curriculum and high-stakes testing have taken the forefront, one wonders if there is any hope for the principles the open classroom embodied. I believe there is.

Enter the Open Classroom 2.0. Once again walls will be removed, learning will be individualized, meaningful projects collaborated on, and resources shared as teachers and schools shift their roles to accommodate this new learning environment. This time the open classroom will extend far beyond the school building. It will extend across the country and across borders, connecting students and teachers in distant places to allow open communication, collaboration and meaningful learning. And it will be powered by a new technology movement that has come to be known as Web 2.0, which will provide educators and schools the tools they need to promote the principles embodied in the original open classroom.

Open Doors

In a typical day a Brewster Central School District in suburban New York, a high school math teacher posts the evening's homework assignment online, a concerned parent logs in to check up on her daughter's grades and attendance, the superintendent posts his monthly newsletter, a student updates her web portfolio with a recent reflection, and the PTA president posts the latest fund raising info for the evening's meeting. Meanwhile, over in White Plains, students are participating in videoconferences with students all over the world as they dialogue with other students about global issues and brainstorm ways they can take action. These are not hypothetical situations but actual events taking place in our schools.

Perhaps one of the most profound impacts this new digital movement will have on education is the ability to allow schools to open their doors to the community and far beyond. Teachers, students, parents and all stakeholders will have the ability to communicate and share information almost instantaneously, creating an open and transparent community like never before. Nor does this new open line of communication stop at the school district's boundaries. Students and teachers can now participate in the global classroom and share viewpoints, concerns, and ideas with their counterparts across the ocean. We are entering an age where distance is no longer a barrier and a classroom in a distant county can be as close as computer screen.

As schools open up their classrooms and prepare their schools to seize these new opportunities, we are beginning to see an impact on when, where, and how learning takes place. Learning is no longer limited to the school's building, schedule, or course offerings. Isolation of content areas and student participation is making way for cross-curricular group work. High tech classrooms are more likely to resemble offices at Google Labs than the rows, columns and teacher center classrooms of the traditional school. Schools are opening up to new possibilities.

Open Opportunities

In Fairfax Virginia, schools are taking advantage of the internet to offer their students opportunities previously unavailable. Students are choosing from classes never before offered at their school that can be accessed 24/7 and fit the scheduling and pacing needs of individual students. Mississippi is proposing similar self paced online programs while Michigan is making them a requirement for graduation. And it's not just the students benefiting. Teachers in Texas are also taking advantage of online opportunities for professional development through TexasStargate, and online portal of courses, tools and resources. At high tech high schools such as those in Philadelphia, Napa, Los Angeles, and San Diego schools are completely restructuring their learning environments to take advantage of opportunities that technology can offer. Lockers are replaced by individual student work stations, student teams are replacing content area courses, and the traditional rows and columns seating arrangements are being replaced by flexible and mobile classrooms where students can be seen collaborating in small groups on multi-disciplinary projects or preparing for internships in local businesses.

Open Source

The website at Meriwether Lewis Elementary in Portland, Oregon, was designed by the school's principal and is maintained and contributed to by the entire school. The school pays no licensing feeds, contracting costs, or a steep monthly payment for maintenance because WordPress, the blogging software that powers it, is free. On a much larger scale, Jim Hirsch of the 52,000 student in metropolitan Dallas is working on replacing all proprietary software for schools with free open source alternatives such as Linux and Open Office within the next five years; bad news for Microsoft but good news for tight budgets. And more than just software source code is being shared. MIT has recently made course content available online through their MIT OpenCourseWare for anyone wanting to take an MIT class without the MIT tuition. Meanwhile, new standards are being established for digital learning materials like SCORM used in online learning environments such as Florida's and Michigan's virtual schools.

What this means for schools is that educational technologies are becoming affordable options. It means that many of the open classroom principles made possible through new technologies can become a reality. It means that through sharing our collective resources, we can not only provide new opportunities, but can help make technology and education equitable for all schools.

These schools offer hope that the principles behind the original open class movement, principles such as collaboration, sharing, authenticity, individualism and openness are not lost, but are being rediscovered though a different movement taking place called Web 2.0. As Mark Prensky pointed out in his article Adopt and Adapt, schools are discovering old ways of doing new things and we've seen evidence of this as schools use new web technologies to breath new life into a old movement. "When will it happen?", he asks. It is happening now. And as open source, open doors and open opportunities give schools a glimpse of the world beyond their boundaries, classrooms will continue to open.

Afterword

The Open Classroom 2.0 is already taking place. The technologies of Web 2.0 are continuously being adopted and adapted to meet the diverse needs of our schools. But it equally important to consider to what end. Is bigger really beautiful, as Joel Barker ascribes to the Supertech way of thinking about technologies purpose. In my opinion, very few schools have the resources to think of technology in this way. In fact, scarcity is a common mode of existence for many schools, which have forced them to pursue and demand technologies that address this reality. They are looking into ways that can help their students compete and achieve in a global society, under the assumption that competition will be fierce because of limited economic opportunities. However, schools are also looking for technology to fulfill needs and nourish relationships within a local communityand have adapted web site technology to this end. Ultimately though, despite the ostensible purposes for these new technologies, I believe Joel Barker is correct in his assumption that underlying it all is the humanistic side of technology. The new tools, whether blogs, LMS, Open Source, or web apps, are all being used to develop the human potential, our students, towards a noble end.

Elementary School Technology Needs: A Needs Assessment

Abstract: Given the potential of technology to enhance teaching and learning, there is little surprise that schools have been investing in technology. Unfortunately, technology has been and continues to be an expensive and ongoing investment. Recent federal mandates and public demand have led to increasing pressures on schools to show results and to justify such heavy expenses as technology. Sandy Grove Elementary has followed national trends in its recognition of technology’s potential, its increasing investment, and its need to justify this expense with hard evidence. Sandy Grove is still in the early stages of its evaluation process and currently there is little hard data on the impact of program efforts on teaching and learning. This purpose of this study, then, is to gather an early assessment of where Sandy Grove stands in its current efforts to integrate technology into the classroom, what impact these efforts were having on teachers and students, and what is needed to move forward. In order to assess the technology needs of Sandy Grove Elementary, a survey of Sandy Grove’s educators was conducted using School Technology Needs Assessment (STNA). Findings from the survey suggest that while the technology resources are in place, the human resources have yet to be fully developed.

No Access, No Support, Big Problem

Perhaps the most intuitively obvious need for schools to utilize technology is simply the presence of and access to the technology resources themselves. Some of the key questions identified by the U.S. Department of Education (2002) for assessing technology in schools ask whether the equipment is present, is it available to staff and students, and are personnel available to proved technical support. The state of North Carolina has likewise provided access and infrastructure guidelines for successfully implementing technology in schools through its IMPACT model for media and technology programs adopted through the state’s technology plan (Public Schools of North Carolina, 2007). These include providing technology resources, providing barrier free access to technology resources, and providing support staff to maintain equipment and assist with technical questions. The necessity of these components is further documented in the literature (ISTE, 2002; North Central Regional Education Laboratory, 2000; Milken Exchange, 1998; Benton Foundation, 2003).

Technology Vision and Leadership

Based on years of experience providing technical assistance and professional development, Byrom and Bingham (2001) concluded, “leadership is probably the single most important factor affecting the successful integration of technology into schools” (p. 4). A survey of the literature on school technology integration reveals a number of frequently cited components of effective technology leadership including: developing and communicating a shared vision for technology use, modeling the effective use of technology use by administration, administrative support of changes in policies and practices, providing teacher incentives, and hiring practices that consider technological literacy and leadership as criteria for selection (Baylor & Ritchie, 2002; CEO Forum, 1999; Kelly & Thomas, 2002; Milken Exchange, 1998; Byrom, 2007; ISTE, 2002; U.S. Department of Education, 2002: Frazier & Bailey, 2004).

Webquesting? Then Scaffold and Choose Wisely

On a recent mission to incorporate American Memory and PowerPoint as part of a 4th grade webquest, I though I would browse the literature on the subject. First of all, I was surprised at how few results were returned when entering the keyword “webquest” in the NClive database. If I’m not mistaken, I believe that there were about 72 hits. Just out of curiosity, I tried the ERIC database and only got 74. Considering that the webquest has been around since ’95, there has apparently been very little written in the major media sources on the topic and the academic journals. As a student in a Masters program in Educational Technology, this was even alarming. Typically, instructional delivery models are frequently studied and evaluated, but there has been very little concrete research on this topic. I was, however, fortunate enough to find in the NClive database an article from an excellent source called the Journal of Research on Technology in Education published by the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE), famed for the NETS standards that are used widely in schools and teacher education programs

The journal article, appropriately enough, was a study of how tasks should be structured in a webquest to provide an appropriate level of scaffolding and how to select web resources to support WebQuest learning experiences. One of the data sources used in this study was PowerPoint presentations created by students during their WebQuest that were scored by rubrics incorporated into the quest. In a preliminary study, researchers found that students who were given more specific procedures for completing their task, in this case a brochure, acquired more “community knowledge”, were more likely to produce a higher quality product, and were less likely to click external links that led to site other than those designated in the WebQuest. Using results form the previous study, the researchers incorporated concept map as a part of the WebQuest in addition to the explicit instruction laid out in the process part of the quest. The researchers found that providing students with a concept map to record information found from websites they visited helped them to better extract, remember, organize and present the information they found. In addition, that students preferred sites that were simple, organized, contained multimedia elements, contained few menus, and were not “too wordy”. Finally the researchers concluded that conceptual scaffolds such as study guide to help students identify the appropriate information and concept maps that helped them organize it supported students “as they were engaged in learner centered, resource-based learning.”

In the literature review, the researches mentioned some finding from prior studies of the unexpected difficulty in implementing a webquest (despite following the structure design laid out by Dodge), specifically in the amount of teacher support that was still required despite their best efforts to design a WebQuest with well laid out guidelines. This and the results of their study suggest that my WebQuest will require a lot of planning, carefully chosen sites, and a lot of scaffolding during the process part of the quest. Apparently, designing and effective webquest in not as easy as it seems.

MacGregor, S. K., & Lou, Y. (2005). Web-Based Learning: How Task Scaffolding and Web Site Design Support Knowledge Aqcuisition. Journal of Research on Technology in Education , 37 (2), 161-175.

Web Based Learning

Planning for Technology

An old proverb says that, “A vision without a plan is just a dream, a plan without a vision is just drudgery, but a vision with a plan…” Perhaps having a plan for technology is unlikely to change the world, but it is certainly as important for effectively integrating technology into schools as the support of a strong leader. Without a sound plan, the necessary resources to carry out this plan, and an evaluation of whether or not the plan is working, the vision is merely wishful thinking, despite the initial good intentions. Perhaps this is what the state of Kentucky had in mind when they became the first state in the union to fully fund a comprehensive technology plan, or why in 1994 state legislators in Ohio required every district to develop a technology plan a prerequisite to participation in a statewide technology initiative (Milken Exchange, 1998).