The Big Green Monster

Every Mother’s Day, my mom and I go to the nursery and pick out flowers for our gardens. This year, I decided to try my hand at vegetables as well. I bought two cherry tomato plants and some cilantro. Well, the cilantro died almost immediately, but my tomato plants chugged along until early in the summer before they started to take over my entire yard. Finally, in late July the tomatoes started to arrive and they haven’t slowed down since. I have picked literally hundreds of tiny tomatoes and that does count the ones my dogs have gotten away with. While this process must be rather entertaining for the neighbors, every afternoon I high hurdle over the fence that ineffectively protects the plant from the dogs and then crawl under the plant and paw through the leaves trying to find all the little red gems.

For the past few days, as I have been bobbing and weaving my way around the green monster, I have thought that this activity is the perfect metaphor for using technology in the classroom. The key to finding all of the tomatoes is looking at the leaves from literally 50 different directions. They hide under branches and leaves and every new way you hold your head looking at the plant, you literally stumble upon another handful of tomatoes. Similarly, through twitter networks and RSS feeds, teachers are literally looking in hundreds of different directions and every so often, they discover a new tool or strategy to implement in the classroom. Each day that I am out in my tomato patch, I smile thinking about what the neighbors must think and laugh at my dogs waiting patiently outside the fence hoping for a snack. I also relish the aerobic/pilates-like activity this has become and find the search as relaxing and enjoyable as the reward. My hope is that this holds true for folks in the classroom as well. Just like we hope for our students to enjoy the journey of learning as much as the results, I hope teachers enjoy the pursuit of new technologies as much as the actual reward of finding something new to implement in their classrooms.

Is Tech Where It’s At?

I am staring out of a rainy window in Memphis having just finished the Lausanne Laptop Institute. Having done a reasonable amount of traveling lately, I have been overly exposed to the public and its ridiculous habits. Without going on a tirade about people’s absurd behavior when exiting a plane, I keep thinking of the constant cell phone conversations that I got to overhear in the past two weeks. They almost always started with “Where you at?” Well, despite the grating of terrible grammar, it does give me pause to think. After a summer of heavy reading and a couple presentations here at Luasanne, I can’t help but pause to think about where we are “at.”

One thing that has been perfectly clear to me is the success of the launch of our one to one program. Those that know me know that I was not for laptops in any form and was brought reluctantly into this whole process. But I must applaud Elizabeth Helfant and my colleagues who did some serious heavy lifting in the years prior so that once the magic day arrived, almost one year ago, it was as seamless and meaningful as possible.

Despite this success, I am still left wondering about and assessing the role of technology in education. Thomas Newkirk in his book Holding on to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones discusses the early mechanization of education where many thought of a good education as a factory churning out identical products. He quotes one expert of the time as saying, “Teachers cannot be permitted to follow caprice in method. When a method which is clearly superior to all other methods has been discovered, it alone can be employed. To neglect this function and to excuse one’s negligence by proclaiming the value of the freedom of the teacher was perhaps justifiable under our earlier empiricism, when supervisors were merely promoted teachers and on the scientific side knew little more about standards and methods than the rank and file” (18). He goes on to discuss how in the process of reforming education, too much attention was given to research and little was paid to the actual classroom teachers and their “wisdom of practice” (19). At first this may seem like a perfect argument for technology and a way to convince the reluctant adopters. But as a classroom teacher, I support the “wisdom of practice.” All of this makes me worry, even just for a minute, as so many of these experts that travel around and educate us about technology use in the classroom have been out of the classroom for years. Are we walking down the same slippery slope that Newkirk is describing?

David Warlick recently discussed the results of two polls he ran. The first stated that teachers could still be good teachers without the use of technology and the second claimed that a teacher that is not using technology in the classroom is not doing his job. How can these results possibly exist side by side? Where will these two points converge?

All of this is not a drawn out way to announce that I am abandoning the tech side of the world. That would be impossible: I just joined Facebook. It is simply a cautionary note that we not go blindly into this new world. I believe that technology makes the classroom a more dynamic student-centered learning environment. I simply hope that we stop, look at what we are doing, reassess and make sure that our original reasons are still sound or that our new ones are even more solid. I know that my students are engaged in the literature and the class and writing sooner and more often with the use of technology. In the absence of hard date and research, this will just have to do for now. Finally, this is also a pledge from me that I redouble my efforts to make sure that on the eve of this new school year, I am doing everything I can to make sure my classroom is the best place possible for the students who will reside there these next nine months.