Learning & Leading Through Technology - September_October

As Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, has said, “Let’s let computers do what computers do best.” PDS is doing exactly that by using both third-party and home-grown software to track and map student progress over time at a remarkable level of detail.

At PDS and other schools, students as young as first grade develop content and products, share and comment on work with other students, and archive their products. That means that at age 6 and 7, they are already building digital portfolios. Teachers act as facilitators rather than content providers.

At the Pomfret School in Pomfret, Connecticut, I watched physics students set up problems and let the computer crunch the numbers while their teacher assessed results using video and Voice Thread, not the impersonal and inarticulate stroke of a red pencil.

Several schools I visited have created publicly accessible faculty assessment rubrics. Administrators post annual goals on a public site and invite staff to comment, question, contribute, and visit each others’ classes.

Many Schools Are Getting It Right

Does online learning
lead to student engage-
ment? Not necessarily.
Answering canned ques-
tions on a computer is no
more engaging than answer-
ing canned questions in
person. But I visited schools
where various types of
online learning are truly
changing the fundamen-
tal relationships among
teachers, students,
and knowledge. Many
schools are getting it
right with technology.

Here are a few great examples:

• At the Dalton School in New York, New York, a math teacher collaborates with teachers in other countries to create a shared problem-set environment where students solve problems together.

• At Brecknock Elementary School in rural Pennsylvania, third graders vie for a Tweeter-of-the-Day award, which encourages students to gain comfort with online collaboration.

• At Poughkeepsie Day School in New York, teachers lead parents through an exercise at back-to-school night to set up their own Twitter accounts and send their first tweets so they would know what their children were doing on social media at school.

• At the Cushing Academy in Ash-burnham, Massachusetts, high school students maintain a class blog and notes on Google Docs so that they—and not the teachers—control the work and discussion after hours.

• At Baylor School in Tennessee, one teacher told me that he often watches active, engaged, highly appropriate student-led discussions about classroom topics scroll by well into the night in the class chat rooms.

• And at Flint Ridge School outside of Washington, D.C., when a math teacher followed his spouse to Chicago for the year, the administration saw an opportunity to leverage the time difference and is paying the teacher to serve as a low-cost evening math help desk that their students can access during after-school hours.

Embracing Student Control

So what is the technology bow-and-
arrow good at? It is good at democra-
tizing the creation and management
of knowledge, which can be controlled
by either the teacher or by the student.

I watched students sit in a gorgeous videoconference facility listening to a teacher in some other part of the world and politely raising their hands and responding to the questions she posed.

In another school, students stood and recited the parts of the human heart as they rotated images on their iPads at the direction of the teacher. At Franklin Community School in Indianapolis, Indiana, students in Don Wettrick’s revolutionary Innovations class are designing, refining, and prototyping projects of their own creation through social media outreach. By the time this article is published, they will have conducted a beta test and feedback of Google Glass in their classroom. At Mount Vernon Presbyterian in Atlanta, Georgia, a ninth grader told me how her class is working with the teacher to write and publish its own history book.

Asking the Tough Questions

Which of these are true backflips to the lofty vision of Dewey, where teachers let go the reins and embrace student control, and which are polished, retooled cogs on the Industrial Age model and mindset? Which schools are innovating, and which have checked the box marked innovation Are the students asking more questions or fewer when they have access to technology?

Are the students asking more questions than the teacher? Does the use of technology in the learning environment lead to more time devoted to student– student and student-led discussion?

Does the use of technology decrease the amount of time that the teacher is the focal point of the classroom? Are teachers becoming co-learners and lead learners with their students, or have they just added some new grease to the same old skid?