Desperate SBTS

The assumptions that Sylvia Martinez (President of Generaion YES) challenges are 1) that teachers do not use technology because they have not received enough and/or adequate professional development and 2) the way to get teachers to use technology is to offer them more and/or better professional development. Sylvia’s assertion is that if professional development is not working – then more professional development won’t work any better. She backs this claim with research that shows that teachers are offered and do participate in technology professional development. She believes that the professional development offered to teachers is not effective because of the gap between the time and place of training and the time and place of implementation. Teachers can be taught how to use technology tools in a lab with the guidance of a trainer and the support of colleagues, but they teach in isolation with no follow-up support so they loose what they had gained in training.

The model that Sylvia proposes as a solution for encouraging teacher implementation of technology is one that that includes students as allies, teachers and mentors to teachers.
Noticing that it is natural to have students helping out in the classroom she suggests that schools could use students to support teacher technology development. She describes the Generation YES (Youth and Educators Succeeding) project that helps schools adopt this model.Students receive training from the technology specialist in the applications and technology tools and also in communication skills, and they in turn collaborate with their teachers to suggest technology integration ideas and provide training and support for the use of the necessary tools as teaching and learning is happening in the classroom. This I an intriguing idea that I believe is getting some attention as I have heard it echoed in the two presentations from the SBTS tech 11/29 blog. How much easier would it be to teach student than teachers? Would your teachers be receptive to having students show them how to use technology tools? Would students learn better? Would your teachers be receptive to the constructivist teaching model this technology integration model relies on?

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I have young adult children.  My 27 year old daughter is just old enough to have missed the remix craze, so she is sometimes as mystified as I, but has greater appreciation for its inherent creativity than I.  My 24 year old son and his high school buddies have produced several amateur films and their experiences with editing naturally led them into this genre.  My 22 year old son lives at home and frequently shares interesting tidbits he finds on the internet with me!  So I am not completely unfamiliar with the remix genre. 

But – until I watched this presentation – I hadn’t thought of these videos as a genre.  I am not exactly sure why that matters – maybe I just realized that these videos are truly creative work.  If raising our awareness about this genre was one of Lessig’s objectives – then his presentation was successful for my part.  I will have a greater appreciation for the effort an consideration that goes into their creation.  If I agree that these remix videos are the literacy of the youth – and not merely entertainment – then the amount of time an effort that goes into creating them is a reflection of the earnestness of the message and the messengers, the video’s creators.  

A point of connection with the November presentation – Lessig speaks about how the remix genre is being forced underground by the refusal of the recording industry to loosen its control of “copyright” regulations an November speaks about how Ipods are worn by our children where every hour of the day – except when they are in school where they are banned.  It seems that in both cases the opportunity to foster, promote, and support creativity and the critical thing that goes with it is being lost because we are suspicious of a technology.  We could probably think of other examples.  As SBTS, maybe the most important part of our job isn’t to know how to use these technologies but to know how to promote them as the ne tools of creativity.  November tells us that the students will figure out how to use the tool.  It will be the teacher’s job to present students with situations and opportunities for using these tools in a creative process.

And I really liked the PowerPoint!  It was very interesting how the sides did enhance his words – and I thought he was a very good speaker.  Perhaps speakers who are less animate could benefit from this style of presentation. I am going to try to model my next presentation after his technique!    

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I was interested in the coordination of Web2.0 tools that November proposes. So far, I have only encountered these tools as they have been discussed in isolation. I attended a K12 conference in blogging. I’ve listened to explanations of how podcasting works. But I have not heard anyone explain how thewe tools could work together. It helps me to understand their power to think of them as a package, rather than seperate applications.
I also appreciated how he put them into the context of the global community and the necessity for developing students who are comfortable in the multi-cultural global economy that is developing.
I was interested in his comments that teachers need not be trained in these tools if students have the training. One of the conferences in K12 was based on this same idea. Teachers should not be afraid to experiment with Web2.0 tools because 1) the students will help the teacher, and may even be better at figuring out how to use them and 2) learning how use these would be a great problem solving opportunity of the kind November speaks of.
Finally, I took the Teaching with Geometer’s Sketchpad online course this summer and one of the comments from math teachers learning this software is that they didn’t see their students exercising the patience to figure out how to construct their own shapes or work through some of the constructing challenges. This analysis of student motivation agrees with November’s observation that American students are not taught or challenged to develop problem solving skills.

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