Technology: "the totality of means employed to provide objects necessary for human sustenance and comfort; a technical method of achieving a practical purpose."
Examples of technologies:
Examples of educational technologies:
Some technologies are culturally transforming while others are merely convenient
In the history of schooling, the following technologies were culurally transforming:
The following technologies were "merely convenient" in the history of schooling (that is, they allow people to do the same things they've always done, but in an easier way):
But schools are difficult to change; there are many barriers to change. The most important barrier to change is habit: people tend to do things the way they've always done them, unless something in the environment causes a habit to no longer work the way it has worked.
To improve student learning, schools must improve CURRICULUM and INSTRUCTION
NOTE: The Internet itself will do NOTHING to improve student learning. Without changes in Curriculum and Instruction, the Internet will be nothing but a FAD, a "money pit," and a diversion from truly important educational issues. Indeed, simply having students "browse" the Internet to look for information actually DECREASES thinking.
How can the Internet help schools to improve curriculum and instruction?
- By providing the opportunity to restructure educational ACTIVITIES (to increase relevance, individualization, engagement, and academic challenge)
Example activities
- By providing improved/increased RESOURCES (including information, images, data, multimedia)
- By providing improved/increased COMMUNICATION (among teachers and students, and with parents, subject-matter experts, and the community)
- By encouraging the teaching of CRITICAL THINKING and MEDIA LITERACY (the Internet is full of false and misleading information and requires these skills)
Textbooks are one of the greatest expenses of schools and school districts. They are easily damaged and lost, and become obsolete before being published. The Internet contains (or will contain) much more compelling information resources than textbooks, as well as real-world data which should become the primary "raw material" of teaching and learning. The biggest problem with the "factory model of schooling" is that it assumes all learners in a classroom are the same. This is obviously false. (This is not to say that there aren't deep similarities among students; there are. But we need become better at acknowledging and dealing with both the differences and the similarities). The Internet offers the possibility of individualizing the activities of learning, providing learning on a "just-in-time" and "as needed" basis. This allows students with special needs (all learning needs are special) the potential to pursue learning that is "OUT OF SEQUENCE" yet relevant and engaging. Education is communication. Communication is education. The Internet is the most useful medium of communication since writing. (This will be more true as the Internet is increasingly used for voice and video in addition to data.) The medium is inherently educative. One cannot venture into a new virtual space without learning something. The new world of information requires the massification of a new skill. That is, the masses in advanced societies need to learn a skill that heretofore had been only learned by the elites. That skill is "critical thinking," also known as "media literacy." This involves the ability to judge whether a given piece of information is credible. Before now, most students learned to "believe what you read," because we taught them that textbooks and encyclopedias are infallible. The Internet is inherently fallible (as is all perception); this realization will cause schools to place much more emphasis in the future on teaching people how to think, instead of what to think. The Internet is multimedial. In the age of television, schools cannot create compelling learning situations using just chalk, worksheets, texts, and speech. Educating the "savvy media consumer" that is our current student requires the use of sound, images, video, animation, interactivity, and hypertextuality. Hypertextuality is the key feature of the World Wide Web. This medium CAN be used for linear learning activities (witness this activity), but it also supports "serendipitous learning," following curiosity or inquiry where it leads, rather than following a previously-learned script. (The key to utilizing hypertextuality educationally is curriculum planning: "In order to effectively target technology to support teaching and learning it is necessary to engage in planning at the state, school district, school, and classroom level," http://www.fwl.org/techpolicy/recapproach.html) The technology creates the necessity for intensive involvement in curriculum planning on the part of teachers. True, localized, individualized, engaged, problem-based, multimedial, hypertextual learning requires that teachers plan the activities of their students. This is a major shift in the functioning of K-12 public schools, where teachers have primarily been in the role of curriculum delivery rather than curriculum planning.
But schools are difficult to change. There are many barriers to change.
The most important barrier to change is habit: people tend to do things the way they've always done them, unless something in the environment causes a habit to no longer work the way it has worked.
(These excerpts taken from "Teaching is a Cultural Activity," by James W. Stigler and James Hiebert, American Educator, Winter 1998, p. 4-11.)
"Cultural activities (like family dinners) are represented in cultural scripts, generalized knowledge about the even that resides in the heads of participants. These scripts not only guide behavior, they also tell participants what to expect. Within a culture, scripts are widely shared, and therefore they are hard to see. Family dinner is such a familiar activity that it sounds strange to point out all of its customary features....
"Cultural scripts are learned implicitly, through observation and participation--not by deliberate study. This differentiates cultural activities from other endeavors. Take, for example, the activity of learning to use a computer. For older Americans, using the computer is usually not a cultural activity. We learned how to use the computer by consciously working on our skills. [But] learning computers is ... rapidly becoming a culutral activity. Children, for example, learn naturally, by handing around computers."
"Teaching ... is a cultural activity." [It] is learned through informal participation over long periods of time. It is something one learns to do by growing up in a culture rather than by formal study."
"It is not hard to see where the scripts come from or why they are widely shared. A cultural script for teaching begins forming early, sometimes even before children get to school. Playing school is a favorite preschool game. As children move through twelve years and more of school, they form scripts for teaching. Any adult probably could enter a classroom tomorrow and act like a teacher because all of us chare this cultural script. In fact, one of the reasons that classrooms run as smoothly as they do is because students and teachers [often] have the same script in their heads; they know what to expect and what roles to play."
"Teaching is a complex system created by the interactions of the teacher, the students, the curriculum, the local setting, and other factors that influence what happens in the classrom. The way one component works--say the curriculum--depends on the other components in the system, such as the teaching methods being used.
"Cultural activities are highly stable over time, and they are not easily changed, for two reasons: First cultural activities are systems; and systems, especially complex ones such as teaching, can be very difficult to change. The second reason is that they are embedded in a wider culture, often in ways not readily apparent to members of the culture. If we want to improve teaching, we must recognize and deal with both its systematic and cultural aspects.
"Teaching systems, like other, complex systems, are composed of elements that interact and reinforce on another; the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. One immediate implication of this fact is that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to improve teaching by changing individual elements or features. In a system, all the features reinforce each other. if one feature is changed, the system will rush to "repair the damage," perhaps by modifying the new feature so it functions like the old one did."
"It has now been documented in several studies that teachers who are asked to change features of their teaching often modify the features to fit within their pre-existing system instead of changing the system itself. The system assimilates individual changes and swallows them up. Thus, although surface features appear to change, the fundamental nature of the instruction does not. When this happens, anticipated improvements in student learning fail to materialize, and everyone wonders why...."
"The fact that teaching is cultural further complicates and impedes efforts to change it. The widely shared cultural beliefs and expectations that underlie teaching are so fully integrated into teachers' worldviews that they fail to see them as mutable. The more widely shared a belief is, the less likely it is to be questioned, or even noticed. This tends to naturalize the most common aspects of teaching, to the point that teachers fail to see alternatives to what they are doing in the classroom, thinking that this is just the way things are. Even if someone wanted to change, things that seem this natural are perceived as unchangeable. It is no wonder that they way we teach has not changed much for many years."
For more excerpts, click here.
Until this summer, Hillel Torah has had access only in the computer lab and administrative offices. As of this year, every classroom will be wired and equipped with computers. However, to really learn how to use the Internet, you need to get access from home and use it regularly.
Because the WWW is so huge, and is rapidly expanding, it is easy to get lost or overwhelmed at the variety of sites and information available. However, many people have made it easier to explore the WWW by providing "home pages" or lists of WWW sites, often grouped according to subject matter. There are some very good sites, for example, which list educational sites. Here is a small list of these sites:
Here are some Internet sites which contain educational materials of all kinds:
Many groups, both non-profit and for profit, are designing education experiences that welcome participation from students around the world. While most of these projects are not specifically targeted at language arts instruction, each allows for many opportunities to read text and other information, and to disseminate information in written and oral form.
For a comprehensive list of such projects, see Global SchoolNet Foundation's Internet Projects Registry. Some specific up-coming educational projects about which I've heard good things are:
Innovative teachers who want to engage their students in exciting educational experiences can use the Internet to dramatically increase the breadth and depth of what is possible. There are resources on the Internet pertaining to almost any topic imaginable. Teachers who know how to use the Internet can design projects which are relevant to the interests of their students, resulting in much more engagement in educational activities. (See Organizing and Facilitating Telecommunications Projects).
One form of educational project which utilizes the internet is a "Webquest." "A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet, optionally supplemented with videoconferencing." (See "Some Thoughts About Webquests", by Bernie Dodge of San Diego State University). These can be short or long term, and help to make the students' internet experience focused and related to specific outcomes.
The "Starship" technology will make it easier to create and design web-based or web-enhanced projects.
Every school needs a teacher who knows not only how to use the Internet in her classroom, but also knows how to help other teachers to "go online" and get their students using the Internet. Practice using the Internet, and utilizing it in classes, is the most important qualification of these "Internet Gurus." It is also possible to expand one's knowledge of the Internet by browsing the Internet itself, paying special attention to organizations that are promoting the Internet, and becoming a participant in efforts to expand access and skills among teachers and students.
| by cac. |
