Yesterday, I began a series of blog posts about the responsibility that comes along with the use of powerful technology tools in school. We cannot hand students the keys to the Internet without some discussion of the ethics and responsibilities of driving on the Superhighway.

But students aren’t the only ones in this discussion that have responsibilities. Teachers also must understand their role in the process—and I’m not just talking about their responsibility to teach responsibility to their students. Teachers have three main areas of responsibility of their own when using instructional tools in the classroom.

Learn the Tools

Long before a teacher can possibly use a tool to teach, she must first be a student. This has been true as long as there have been technological advances in education. When chalkboards were first introduced to schools, teachers responded much like they do now to modern tech tools.

Black-boards are not uncommon, but are little resorted to by the teacher. This would be the case with most of the school apparatus which is thought indispensable…. Most teachers, with their present qualifications, would not understand their useful applications. (Barnard, 1839, p. 5)

The importance of the black board as an instrument of instruction…has been insisted on in every periodical on education which I have seen…. In many of our common schools, however, it has been but barely introduced. The teacher knows almost as little how to use it as his pupils. (Alcott, 1843, p. 170)

That second quote comes from a book of instruction for teachers about how to use a chalkboard, including step-by-step tutorials. Today, of course, the chalkboard (or white board) is such an integral part of what we do we don’t even give it a second thought. Instruction in its use is no longer necessary.

This is not true with more recent technology. Unlike the chalkboard, today’s teachers did not grow up in a culture where computers and the Internet were an integral part of daily life and school. Thus, we need to first become learners and understand the technology ourselves. This may mean taking workshops and seminars (more on this in my next post), reading books and articles, or just jumping in and fiddling, but it will not happen on its own, and it will not happen by osmosis.

I read a blog post yesterday which gives a great explanation of the importance of this mindset, and which also leads right into the next responsibility:

Use the Tools

Many times teachers attempt to leap directly from a basic familiarity with a new tool into using it in instruction. I’m certainly guilty of this myself, particularly if the tool is one that intrigues me and is full of possibilities. In my experience, though, this usually leads quickly to either miserable failure or at best a superficial layer awkwardly tacked on to existing instruction.

There is a crucial step missing: teachers must first use the tool themselves for their own learning, professional or otherwise. Until you integrate something this deep and powerful into your own learning process on some level, you can’t comprehend how a student will interact with it. This is not a new idea, but it is one that does not yet pervade the profession, and until it does, new technology will be thought of as a fad or an add-on—or worse, a substitute for “real” instruction.

We have to continue to remind ourselves that these are not new subjects to be taught, they are simply new tools. Would you trust a flying instructor who could pass a written test about piloting but had never flown an airplane? Why, then, do we think we can teach students about blogging if we aren’t bloggers ourselves?

Design Quality Learning Experiences

This is (and should be) the hardest part of teaching, and one which consumes the largest amount of energy and time. If done well, it will be like the Parthenon: the structure you and your students build together will hold up for a very long time. If done poorly, it will be more like a movie set: it looks great from one side, but has little substance and less endurance.

Yesterday I discussed the students’ responsibilities in using technology and the importance of teaching them. Many objections to technology use revolve around keeping the students from “fooling around” during class. Let them blog, and they might write about something inappropriate. Let them have cell phones and they might text the test answers to each other. Let them use a wiki and they might get outside help on their assignment. (All of this happened before there was technology, of course, but let’s just give the argument the benefit of the doubt for the moment.)

I suspect that beneath these objections is fear: fear of losing control of the classroom and fear that the lost control will reveal inadequate and ineffective teaching methods that are more easily hidden in a teacher-centered, traditional structure.

Thus, the problem isn’t the technology, it’s the teacher. Know the limitations and pitfalls inherent in the tools and plan for them. If they might get outside help because they can access the wiki any time, then build that into the assignment. Encourage it, even. Make it essential to the task. That’s more realistic anyway. Of course creating assignments like that is more complicated. It takes thought, energy, and time. But truthfully, it is thought energy and time that we should be putting into our instruction even if it does not involve new tools.

To paraphrase Haim Ginott, we must collectively recognize the frightening conclusion that we are the decisive element in our classrooms, and the responsibility is ours to see that the climate and the learning environment allow our students to thrive.

References

Barnard, H. (1839).First annual report of the Secretary of the Board. &printsec=titlepage&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0" target="_blank">Connecticut Common School Journal, 1, 155-176.

Alcott, W. A. (1843). &printsec=titlepage&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0" target="_blank">Slate and black board exercises. New York: Mark H. Newman.

“With great power there must also come—great responsibility.” (Stan Lee)

“When someone has been given much, much will be required in return; and when someone has been entrusted with much, even more will be required.” (&version=51;" target="_blank">Luke 12:48, New Living Translation)

Growing up, my favorite super hero was Spider-Man. I could relate to him. Peter Parker was a lot like me, super powers notwithstanding. He was a lonely nerd, awkward around other people (especially girls). Then he was handed incredible power and learned—the hard way—that no gift is free. It comes with the responsibility to use it well; the greater the power of the gift, the broader the scope of that responsibility.

I had a brief but interesting Twitter conversation last night with Steven Anderson (@web20classroom) about the layers of responsibility involved when students use tools like Twitter in the classroom. The discussion was prompted by this blog post by Jim Gates, who says, essentially, that allowing students to use Twitter in the classroom is a waste because they wouldn’t use it for anything productive. A number of ideas came up in my conversation with Mr. Anderson which I will explore here over the next few days.

Like Mr. Gates’s post, many of the reactions I hear about using tools like Twitter, blogs, or wikis in the classroom are initially about fear: primarily fear that students will abuse them. Are these fears legitimate? Certainly. There is a long history of students misbehaving in school, and that won’t be any different with new methods and tools.

What we must recognize is that these new technologies are just that: tools. They don’t have an inherent value–they only have a function. The value comes from how the tool is used. A pen was used by Shakespeare to write sonnets…and by Hitler to write Mein Kampf. A hammer was used by carpenters to build the bell tower on Independence Hall…and by Roman soldiers to crucify Christ. We must judge not the implement but the intention.

Some may think that bringing these tools into the classroom is like handing students a loaded gun, and thus the response is either to ban the guns from the school altogether, or to allow strictly controlled access with close supervision and multiple layers of security. The flaw in this reasoning of course is that the function of the gun is explicitly to cause harm to another person—it is not a tool, but a weapon.

Others argue that it is the students who are inherently prone to choosing wrong. I often hear this from teachers in my school, either directly or by implication. This may be, but limiting their access to the tools won’t eliminate this propensity. Instead, we need to educate. Teach students about the possibilities and the pitfalls. Give them freedom within boundaries, and let them know both the rewards that come from responsible use, and the consequences (natural and imposed) that can come from poor choices. I believe, though, that students aren’t by nature bad, simply unwise. And the wisdom they will need as adults to handle the ubiquitous technology they will encounter cannot come by sheltering them from that technology as students.

Wisdom only comes through experience. Peter Parker learned about this when he declined to use his power to stop a burglar: he felt it wasn’t his problem. That burglar later killed his own uncle, and Peter realized he had a choice to make—use his gifts to help others, or be selfish and allow lives to be destroyed. The tools available to students today are far more powerful than pencil and paper, both to build and to destroy. A note degrading someone else might be seen by a few people and can be destroyed before it spreads too far. A blog post degrading someone else might potentially be seen by millions, and can never be completely eliminated.

The thing is, we can do nothing to prevent our students from learning about and having access to these tools. All things considered, isn’t it better that they learn about them in the safe, structured environment of the classroom?

Students may or may not learn responsibility on their own. As educators we also have a responsibility, however, and it is this responsibility I will explore more tomorrow.

Yesterday I shared some thoughts about pretesting that were prompted by a year-old post by Scott McCleod. Today, I came across another year-old blog post, this time by Angela Meiers. In this article, she talks about how comprehension is not something that can be contained in a discrete list of facts and skills, but rather it is an ongoing, recursive process of applying those facts and skills to build a picture of the world.

It occurs to me that what we often do in school is something like handing the students a birdhouse kit. The pieces are pre-measured and pre-cut, and everything we need is already there. We walk them all step-by-step through the assembly of the kit, focusing on their technique in hammering and gluing. It doesn’t matter that some of the kids have designed and built their own birdhouses, and others haven’t ever seen a bird before. At the end of the lesson, everyone in the class has an identical birdhouse–though perhaps we allow them to choose their own colors for the paint.

Rather than giving a pretest that runs through all of the discrete skills in a unit (“explain how to hammer a nail without bending it”, “which goes on first, the roof or the base?”), consider giving your students a one-question pretest that gets at the most important aspects of the unit you are going to teach: “Draw a design for a birdhouse and explain how you would build it.” Here are some sample One-Question Pretests that might work in various subject areas:

• Explain how America became an independent country
• Pretzels come in bags of 24 and you want to give one to each of the 473 students in our school. Figure out how many bags we need to buy and show how you computed the answer without a calculator.
• Where do new plants come from, and how do they grow?
• Tell me what grade you should get for this class, and write a paragraph that convinces me you’ve earned it.
• Read the beginning of this story and write what you think will happen next. Explain why you think so.

While you wouldn’t get discrete data on what specific skills and knowledge your students have, a careful reading and analysis of the students’ responses can give you a wealth of information that would be immensely helpful in planning your instruction. It wouldn’t take any more time than a traditional pretest. If you embed it into other activities, such as including the pretest as a learning center activity that all students will complete over the course of a week during normal rotations, it might even take less time.

How can you apply the One-Question Pretest idea to your own subject and grade level?