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Making School a Little Less Painful through Technology
Nothing discourages Jason Schrage more than teach- ing to the test. But he does
it anyway—he just doesn’t always
tell his students that.
Take, for example, the activity he
undertook with his kids last spring.
Schrage, a social studies teacher at
Horseheads Middle School in New
York, wanted to prepare his students
for state assessments without boring
them to tears. So he got creative.
Schrage connected with another
eighth grade social studies teacher
who was prepping his students for
the same exam. The two teachers,
who worked two hours away from
each other, came up with a list of
questions and, using videoconferencing technology, turned test prep into a
game. They displayed the questions to
both classes simultaneously, and students answered using clickers.
“The class with the highest per-
centage right got the point for their
school,” Schrage says. “At the end
of the day, the school with the most
points had bragging rights.”
The other teacher just happened to
be Schrage’s cousin, so the two Mr.
Schrages hammed it up for their stu-
dents. “We were taunting each other
in front of the kids,” he recalls. “We
jested it up, and they loved it. We took
something that could have been to-
tally lifeless and dry and made it fun.”
After 13 years of teaching the same
subject to hundreds of students,
Schrage relies on technology and the
help of his professional learning net-
work (PLN) to keep things interesting.
“I like to dabble and explore and
experiment,” Schrage says. “That’s
what the technology does for me. It
keeps me energized, and it trickles
down to the kids.”
A big fan of Twitter, Schrage (Twit-
ter name oswego98) has close to 1,500
followers. He frequently puts ques-
tions out to his tweeps asking for new
approaches to old topics, and he usu-
ally gets scads of responses.
That’s how he found educators will-
ing to help his students prepare for a
state test. He came up with a list of top-
ics students needed to know and asked
educators to create Voice Threads—
multimedia slideshows—offering
strategies and tips. Suddenly his
students didn’t have one social
studies teacher, they had dozens
from around the world.
“If one topic was the causes of
the Great Depression, a teacher
might jump in and say, ‘Here are
some things to remember,’ and
someone else might say,
‘Here’s a way to remem-
ber those causes,’ ”
Schrage says.
Like most teach-
ers, Schrage says
he gets annoyed
by the amount
of time he
must dedicate
to standardized
testing.
“They say that
you shouldn’t teach
to the test, but when it
comes down to it, they
evaluate you on how
well your students do,”
he says.
But he makes
the best of it using
technology.
“What’s nice about technology is
that you can set it up so it’s a little less
painful,” he says.
Schrage loves to try new things,
and he hopes his students understand
that’s what education is all about.
“I tell them, we’re experimenting
here,” he says. “I’ve never done this
program before. It could totally flop,
and that’s OK, because it’s about the
learning; it’s not about the grades. I’m
trying to get that into their heads.”
Schrage won the Send a Newbie
to ISTE 2010 contest, which
educator and blogger Beth
Still created to ensure that
great teachers who might
not otherwise be able to go
could have a chance to ex-
perience the conference. It
was at the ISTE conference
in June that he met
face to face for
the first time
with many of
the people in
his PLN.
“It was so
powerful to
be around
people
who have
this intense
excitement
about teaching
and learning
about technol-
ogy,” he says. “It’s
rejuvenating.”
—Diana Fingal is the
senior editor of L&L.
