Learning & Leading Through Technology - September_October

Technologies to Try

Here are three ideas I share in many of my talks and workshops—three “ technologies” that will utterly transform any classroom and will either save money or cost just a fraction of what we are currently spending on plug-in technology. Do you think of these as “technology?”

Paint every wall with IdeaPaint. It costs less than $1,000 for a typical classroom, and you have to paint rooms anyway. Why should students of any age, but particularly the younger students, sit at their desks, hands raised, waiting to be called on to answer questions, when they could all be out of their seats, writing on walls with cheap dry-erase markers,

posing their own questions and sharing their answers with each other all the time? I asked students which modality they would prefer. Guess how they responded.

Buy desks with rolling castors.

At Norfolk Academy in Virginia, I watched a math class instantly form and reform—a flow of dynamic, networked collaboration that would cost thousands of dollars to replicate via plug-in technology.

Stop buying textbooks. To the extent allowed by your governance structure, take the money allocated for textbooks and pay your teachers a healthy stipend to develop their own course materials.

Access all the free, accredited source
material that is readily available on the
internet and proliferating at a remark-
able rate. Ask students to help. What
student would turn down a request
from their favorite teacher to intern over
the summer on this? Once built, the ma-
terials can be easily updated every year.

Aiming at Change

One mantra I repeat is that, contrary to what high-priced consultants and famous authors tell us, change is not always hard. Relative to the really hard things this world has to offer, organizational change is only uncomfortable, sometimes messy, and frequently complicated. We just need to use all the tools at our disposal—all the arrows in our quivers—to help us make it less uncomfortable.