Issues with Technology Use

For me, the issue that resonates the most concerning the possible negative effects of technology is gaming. As someone who has owned several gaming platforms, subscribed to at least two different gaming magazines for several years, and spent countless hours with friends named Zelda and Mario as a child, I understand the draw that these type of games have on a young person. Having worked at a boarding academy for 8 years, I know that it has only become more difficult for young people, especially young men, to turn these games off.

In my own experience video games were always around in my childhood. I can still remember unwrapping the Nintendo Entertainment System that Christmas so long ago. It was exciting and like some kind of super candy. I was hooked from the get go. It wasn't until I was working and finished with college though, that I realized that video games could be an addiction for me. I once spent 26 hrs straight playing a game called Knights of the Round, and it makes me sad just to admit that. I remember that as I played the game I kept telling myself "Oh, it's okay, I'll just play for one more hour." Then I would end up playing for 12 more hours. I remember when I finally quit playing I was astounded that I had utterly wasted more than a day. I vowed to never do that again. It reminds me of the article "When Games Stop Being Fun" by David Becker. In the article Becker quotes a Dr. Timothy Miller who "...cites two defining characteristics of addiction: The person regularly engages in activity for much longer than originally planned and "(continues) doing it in spite of adverse consequences." I was lucky; I recognized my addiction and I quit.

In my life today, I see this kind of gaming addiction all the time, especially in my freshmen boys. At first we could control this issue because we don't allow TVs in the dorms and that was really the end of it. Nowadays, with laptops in every pair of hands and the ultimate accessibility technology provides, it's become really hard to turn kids off of these games. I know how attractive and time consuming some games can still seem to me (and I'm 32 years old!), and I think how much more attractive these games must seem to the young men their being created for.

When I think about the reality of gaming addictions I have two very strong examples that come to mind. First, I have a 20 year-old family member who almost never leaves the house instead he chooses to "live" out his life in front of a computer screen. If he reads, it's on fanfiction.net, if he watches TV, it's on hulu.com, but more than anything he's playing games. The closest he comes to exercise is playing Wii sports. The rest of the family tries very hard to get him to experience real life, but he seems stuck and uninterested in changing. His human interaction is so limited and his interest in real life is minimal. For instance, he recently flunked out of college (where he was starting to make real friendships) because instead of doing homework, he was too busy playing games. This is very scary to the rest of us in the family because this addiction to gaming is having real negative effects on his life. Now if only he could see it that way.

The second example I can think of isn't a student, but the father of one of my current students. I was amazed and saddened to hear this student talk about her father. Like the examples in Becker's article and an article called "The Quest to End Game Addiction" by Julia Scheeres, this student's father spends countless hours playing Everquest every week. She says that every night he gets home and goes straight to the office and plays online. She says that her uncles and other relatives also play and that every family function is dominated by the game. She told me she finds this embarrassing and sad and it makes her worry about her parents' marriage. According to the aforementioned articles, she has plenty of reason to worry.

Simply put, I can't yet think of a way that this kind of technology is contributing to the academic pursuits of any young child or to the health of any individual in any way. Instead, I believe this is one of those areas where we need to educate our children very specifically about why this type of activity could be a problem. I think that people can enjoy video games in a healthy, limited way. However, many of these games, especially those with an online option, are geared specifically toward taking up a lot of a young person's time. That time, is, of course, meant to be taken up with much healthier and more meaningful pursuits. Getting kids to see that, is, I believe, the real goal and the big challenge we face.

The Collaboration Station

Teamwork, collaboration, group projects. In my academic life these have been both some of the most interesting, thought-provoking assignments and some of the most uneven, unenjoyable assignments I can remember. It seems to me that several factors go into making a collaborative project or assignment a success and so I want to spend a little time talking about what I think those factors are.

In my experience, I have been both the winner and the loser when it comes to structure on a collaborative assignment. Many times, because my instructor did not give us a clear framework for the way in which we were to complete our group assignment, one or two of the people in the group ended up carrying the lion's share of the duties. It's an old cliche that you want a "smart" lab partner because then they can do all the hard stuff. I used to listen to a band called The Bruce Lee Band, and the only song this band plays that ever got any airtime was called "Don't Sit Next To Me Just Because I'm Asian."

It plays on the stereotype of all Asians being academically gifted and the idea is there - many people, including my current students, often see collaboration as an opportunity to make the smart kids do all or most of the work while still taking a nice grade home on their report card. I think the best way to combat this characterization of group projects is to provide a much more clear structure of the project or at least communicate expectations of the responsibilities that each individual will carry in the group.

I think another area that I know is an area for growth in my classes is to set high expectations for students with their group projects. All too often I end up giving my kids projects like creating a collage because I want a more fun, creative exercise than working on vocab lists or reading from whichever novel we're working on. However, I find students give me back exactly the effort I put into each lesson and this kind of "go be creative for a bit" class exercise generally (but not always) ends up being fairly low on my "wow, that was a great class" scale. I know that my kids are capable of amazing things and I'm sure any other teacher feels the same way. I often have to remind myself that I should always set the bar extremely high for my students and then, of course, try to find a way to communicate those expectations without making my students lose hope or feel like they've got a ton more work for Mr. Mustard's class.

Finally, I think that projects designed for collaboration should really appeal to the natural sense of wonder and curiosity that we all possess. This is, I believe, where the new technologies can come in and offer a lot to our students. I cannot yet find in my mind ways to incorporate things like social bookmarking, but I think that wikis are a natural place to go with collaborative learning and other web-based technologies like YouTube, blogs, discussion forums and Skype could also be extremely effective in language arts. I think the major drawbacks to these technologies is the essential need for hardware to make them a viable part of any classroom and also the time it may take to teach students how to use the different websites effectively could be prohibitive, depending on the class. However, I think that these technologies and others like them could really open the door for students to become truly interested in different group learning activities.

For me, I feel as though I've held back from collaborative assignments because I've felt that my students might not be truly getting the most out of their class period without my direct instruction. Stepping back from the approach I can see that besides making a not-so-great commentary on my ego, it also is just wrong. Many of the best classroom experiences I had in academy grew from the collaborative projects in my English classes, which usually exemplified the best qualities in group learning (unlike some of my other classes which would fit into the introduction of this blog). I want the same feeling of excitement, creativity and accomplishment for my students today. I already have some really great opportunities for my students to work together, but I'm realizing that I don't have enough. As I write this the seeds of new lesson plans are taking root in my mind. So I look forward to finding ways to implement these technologies and collaboration as a whole in good old room 6 at Monterey Bay Academy. Now if I can only find a smart lab partner to help me...

A digital story

For this assignment I actually have spent quite a bit of time creating a digital story about our recent school trip to Italy that I led, but I've been having issues getting the file uploaded, so in the meantime, here's a digital story (video) I created explaining our Senior Survival Program that we run for our seniors each year. I'm still a little fuzzy as to whether or not a digital story MUST have narration over the top, but with my journalism background, I always prefer to let my subject matter do the talking. Anyhow I think this is a spectacular option for the classroom, especially since kids are so ready to consume modern day media in its many forms. The only drawback that I can see is the time it takes to put these kinds of things together. In the small amount of video editing I've done, I've already logged more than 100 hrs at this computer and that's for about a total of 1 hr of video! So the benefit is huge! But the time it takes to put quality stories together is also huge, unless you've got a lot of training and a pro-style editing station.
Whatever the case, I love putting things like this together. Please enjoy and share your comments!

Tell Me a (Digital) Story

So our next stop on the Educational Technology express is...YouTube. Okay, not exactly, but when you're talking about digital storytelling, nothing else comes close to the magnitude and scope of YouTube. I actually feel pretty good about my classes when it comes to this topic. I know that I could be doing more - much more - with digital storytelling, but I do regularly use YouTube for videos on historical background on authors or certain works, for how-to videos and also to help bring a dynamic element to a topic we're studying. For example, a few weeks ago we were exploring Harlem Renaissance poetry in my American Literature classes and rather than just read through selected works we started class with a five minute background video on the Harlem Renaissance from Discovery Streaming Video, worked through three poems from our text, watched a video clip of Denzel Washington presenting "I, Too" by Langston Hughes. I think this is cool so I posted the video. =)

Then we worked through a few Hughes poems and finished off class with a YouTube video that featured Harlem Renaissance artwork, a recording of Hughes reading a poem. It was one of the best classes we've had this semester and mostly, I believe, because the digital storytelling made our class so dynamic (the great poetry didn't hurt too much either).
I think though, the best digital storytelling comes from my students and their creative abilities. In my classes my students have the opportunities to create any number of different projects to present to the class. Creating a PowerPoint isn't good enough for most of them anymore. Instead, many of my students choose to create videos that allow them to put their mark on our topic. Some of the videos are not that great, but many of them are fantastic. The videos that followed our recent unit on The Great Gatsby were especially good.
I think that digital storytelling is a natural fit in literature classes, because literature is all about storytelling. This is something that I am looking to continually feature in my classes. On my campus, the biggest challenge is that our students are not allowed on YouTube. That's a obstacle that I've yet to figure out. Hopefully there is a solution out there somewhere though.

Google Reader - Week 3

So, Google Reader is super cool and I can totally see how it can make the web much more relevant and useful for me and my students. One thing I will say is that Google Reader is fairly simple, but even with the instructional videos it takes some time to make it all work. I'm just getting started with my reader account, but here are some of the things that I've added to mine:


As you can see, I'm kind of in a diving phase right at the moment. So here's the breakdown on my shared items.
First of all, I've shared a collection of bookmarks about Point Lobos State Reserve, because it's a great place to dive in our area and I love to go there.
Second, I've shared another collection of bookmarks that keep track of shark attacks, because I want to make sure I'm avoiding that kind of diving adventure.
Next, I've shared the link to my dad's blog, which he has kept up daily for about 4 years now as he chronicles his life since the lost of my mother to cancer.
After that I've got a podcast from a GREAT little 5 minute NPR program from Garrison Keilor called "Writer's Almanac." If you've not heard this show give a listen. There's always a poem and lots of cool info about different writers.
Finally, I've got an amazing Flikr account from a really talented landscape artist. The pics you'll find through my link are of Santa Cruz County, so you can see how amazing our local digs are!

I think this is a really neat tool, but I think it would take a lot of intentional instruction to make it useful for my classroom. I think as Google continues to tweak this application, it will get more user friendly and therefore it will have more potential for my classes.

Turning the corner on technology...

Well, this is my third blog and I feel as though I'm beginning to have a change of heart when it comes to technology in the classroom. To be honest, I have had a love/hate relationship with technology in my academic life. I consume technology, but the different technologies that have become so prevalent today were in their larval stages during my education and most of my teachers and professors had no idea how to utilize them. The result in the classes that tried to be "cutting edge" was that the class projects were just confusing, time-consuming and ill-conceived. I much preferred the teachers who stuck to their strengths and thus I preferred teachers using classical teaching methods. As a teacher I have been encouraged to utilize new technologies to stimulate and motivate my students and to make sure their academy education is relevant to their soon-coming college experience and the world that awaits them beyond. So much of the time though, I have been consumed by the smaller, less useful technologies that my students bring to my classroom - cell phones, ipods, etc - that only serve to distract. What I'm beginning to see after reading articles like Andrew Churches's "Welcome to the 21st Century," "21st Century Pedagogy," and "21st Century Assessment," along with J. McKenzie's "The 21st Century Skills Bookmark: A Dozen I-words Trump the 4 Rs," is that I've been focusing on the wrong things and I've failed to see the relevant possibilities technology offers for my classroom. This week, I was especially impressed with a podcast on iTunesU by Dr. Reuben Peuntedura called "TPCK and SAMR: Models for Enhancing Technology Integration. In this podcast, Peuntedura looks at combining technology, pedagogy and content (TPCK) to create a maximum effect in the classroom. He does this by breaking down our utilization of technology in the educational setting (SAMR). At the top of this blog there is a graphic that demonstrates the four levels of implementation. In this model, we can see his breakdown of the levels of implementation of technology in a classroom setting, with "Substitution" being the lowest level and "Redefinition" being the highest. To explain this further, I will use the example of journaling (something we do often in my English classes).
At the substitution level, students would simply keep a digital journal in Word or some similar program. There would be no functional change, but the medium would be different.
At the augmentation level, students would have a blog. The heart of the assignment is the same, but the opportunity to include different kinds of digital media and to receive feedback offers functional improvement over a digital journal.
At the modification level, students could use multi-media technologies like podcasts, youtube, imovie, etc., to redefine journaling and increase the depth of their experience.
Finally we have the redefinition level, which to me is the "wow" factor. Peundetura describes it doing something that "has never been done before." That's a big task and to be honest, I'm not sure exactly what that would look like for journaling. I believe that it would include the previous three levels of implementation, but would also feature other 21st Century Skills, like collaboration and global awareness. In my mind, taking journaling to this level would mean creating something like a wiki that would serve as a forum to help the class find common ground on a topic. Everyone would get to have input and the end result would be a product that represented the class on any given topic. This would enable them to take their individual analysis on a topic and contribute to a communal standard on a topic. By the way, if you're like me and were a bit in the dark about wikis, you might want to watch this short youtube clip:

I suppose overall, I'm beginning to see how technology can and will become a part of my curriculum. The exciting part is that I can envision how some of my less-than-motivated English students might become more engaged with some of the opportunities these new technologies provide.
Recently, the staff at my school spent a lot of time discussing the quality of the spiritual experience on our campus and those discussions helped me to rethink my approach as a teacher. The discussions helped me to refocus my vision for my classroom as a ministry. The ideas and articles that I've been consuming recently are helping me refocus my vision for my classroom in another way - I want to be very intentional about bring my students to Peundetura's level of redefinition. I see that I'm stuck with technology and that I'm hitting the augmentation level at best and I know my kids deserve more. I'm looking at my classroom for the coming year in an entire new light. I've got a lot to learn, but the payoff will be that my kids will learn a lot more too.

God blesses,

Jason

21st Century Skills for the Classroom - What does this mean?

As we consider the different aspects of the inevitable (albeit much resisted) marriage of classrooms and 21st century technologies, one of the "new" ideas bouncing around is the importance and implementation of 21st Century Skills. From the different sources I've digested, including a 30 minute podcast featuring an introduction to 21st Century Skills from Chris Johnson, a former faculty member at Arizona State University who now works as a consultant who promotes these skills, a video by Ken Kay, president of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and several documents from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, I can truly say that I don't see it. To me, even though I've been teaching for only 2 years, I cannot see the big deal that these guys are making over these "skills" that they feel students must have to make it in our current century.

Maybe this is because I believe I have benefited from an outstanding, private education my entire life having spent all of my years in the Seventh-day Adventist education system. I always had teachers utilizing the most recent technologies and the most sensitive and up-to-date teaching methods. I know that when I walk into my classroom each day I challenge myself to not only provide my students with that same quality education that I received, but also to do my best to surpass my teachers for the benefit of my students.

Listening, watching and reading these materials from the proponents of this "new" look at education I guess I was consistently wondering "How is this a new idea?" I think if you went to the best schools in our country, they would all laugh and say "Yeah, we've been doing this for years!" I suppose then, this blog puts me more in league with other dissenters of this "fad" in education like Jay Matthews of the Washington Post and Andrew Rotherham of US News and World Report, who seem to feel as though this is a fancy way of saying our schools should do better.

That idea of our schools doing better, is, of course, something we all believe in. It is a sad truth that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) aims for the minimum, when our schools (and I believe this is the core message of the push for 21st Century Skills is that we should set the bar high and expect more from our kids. Going back to my own education experience, I feel as though that's exactly what I benefited from in my church's school system and I also feel as though that idea of expecting more from the iGeneration is a driving force in my lesson planning.

So here are some of my main issues with the 21st Century Skills crowd and what they are peddling. First of all, listening to Chris Johnson's podcast brought up a lot of issues for me. For the most part, I felt as though his recommendations for the classroom sound good, but upon closer inspection they really fall apart and he contradicts himself to some extent. For example, the idea of setting middle school and high school students loose on an unfiltered network seems unrealistic to me. Yes! We must teach them responsibility, but to say that kids who feel more than they think will not be tempted, distracted or completely derailed by the more negative things available on the net is not being realistic. And according to Johnson, kids are only really "in-school" for a very small percentage of their week. So, if that's true, then why would we choose the deconstructionist route he's recommending that would ultimately utilize time less efficiently? Any teacher knows that there are never enough minutes in a class period to cover everything, but Johnson would have us fill the room with gadgets and toys and books, tell the kids to be creative and then sip our lattes while the kids try to piece together something of value. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea for kids to learn hands-on, but I believe that our kids want us to play a more important role than Johnson envisions.

I also agree with Matthews and Rotherham that there seems to be a major issue with the implementation of these 21st Century Skills in the classroom. I'm blessed to be at a great school that provides me with current technology, but I know many fellow teachers that are not so lucky and I know that many many public school classrooms are in even more dire need of updating their technology. So, since these skills seem to be rooted in access to cutting edge technologies, what happens when the teacher can't get access? And do we, the teachers, really need to teach our kids how to use these new technologies? My kids are quicker on their qwerty keyboards than I'll ever be, they usually are the ones who help me fix my software and hardware issues and they always have the next gadget before I do. So why should I spend my classtime trying to make sure they understand how to use these technologies?

Okay, so here I am being negative and I feel that is never too useful - so what do I like about this concept of 21st Century Technologies. First of all, I do believe in all the goals proponents of these skills have listed. I think that any reasonable person can see that our country must be focused on creating a generation of creative thinkers, problem solvers and capable communicators. So these are good goals these folks have. As Matthews and Rotherham point out, I just want to make sure that the pursuit of a tech-happy, global-thinking workforce doesn't supplant the quest for meaningful content in our classrooms, because that integration of beautiful ideas, amazing invention and the pursuit of developing the whole individual are what truly sets our country apart.

That's my two-cents anyway. =)