A. Based on your experience and passion, what is your personal vision of education?
My vision of what education should and can be is informed by my personal experience and is inspired by the beliefs and views of such educational thinkers as Sal Kahn and Sir Ken Robinson. I have seen that in the current system that we approach learning through leaves too many students with large holes in their understanding of varied content areas. This occurs as a result of the pressures to push through a large amount of curriculum. Students must move on to the next, generally more difficult, stage before fully understanding the concepts that have just been covered because the class is moving on.
Students are also forced into programs of study that neglect to take into account their interests and furthermore their passions. These programs place great importance on math and science, in some cases completely removing artistic options from students’ schooling. When the arts are removed and pressure is placed on every student to achieve at a high level in math and science we systematically stymie creativity.
My vision of education includes a blended learning environment where students can work in their personalized curriculum at the appropriate pace to ensure understanding and further mastery. This personalized curriculum will provide students with basic skills in a broad spectrum of subjects. Students will also be encouraged to follow their passions. They will be provided with the time and strategies to inquiry about projects that they love and how to learn the topic-specific information and skills to be able to be successful in the pursuit of their passion.
B. Please explain how technology currently informs that vision.
Technology plays an extremely important role in this vision. Advancements in technology in the last five years or so have enabled this vision to become actualized. Prior to programs like Kahn Academy (there are many others if that Kahn Academy is not preferred), individualization of learning was next to impossible. At any given time, each student in the class, would be at a different level of understanding. The teacher would have to constantly be assessing and adjusting reading levels, math questions, remediating if needed, or challenging further for each and every student. With software that has algorithms written in to determine levels of understanding, when to push, when to give more practice, when to go back and review prior skills needed, the individualization is done automatically. Each student receives the right pace for them.
The use of technology will also be important in the helping students seek and pursue their passions. The connections that can be made to specified experts through the internet can provide students with an endless list of options and directions for them to be inspired by. Many of us can remember that one teacher that inspired us. We were lucky that our paths crossed, but with the applications available on the internet, those connections don’t have to be a result of luck. Students can seek out like-minded individuals and groups, or mentors outside of the school environment to be able to then bring back and share the knowledge gained to the school community.
C. What emerging technology trends will impact your vision of education in the next five years?
I think the technologies that are emerging and those that are already available that will be most impactful in the development of my vision are those that help teachers teach students how to learn. The applications that I find the most helpful in doing this are those that help us create, capture, and curate (Jeff Utecht). We know that when students create their understanding in their own way that that knowledge stays with them. It is not necessarily the changing technologies that is most needed to foster this deeper learning but a more flexible view of how we assess student work and how we allow them to demonstrate their understanding. Students should be introduced to various software and presentation modes in which they can choose from. These can include the students creating audio recordings in the form of Podcast or one new application that I can see being valuable is Anchor. Anchor is sort of a crowd-sourced podcast where the first recording on a topic can be up to 2 mins and the ‘listeners’ can respond with 1-minute recordings. This creates a podcast that can be downloaded and listened to just like any other podcast. This is one technology that allows us to create, capture, and curate information.
Capturing students work is another powerful motivating factor that can drive my vision of education. Before, student work was seen only by the teacher, maybe the parents, and had no real-world applications. Students can now capture their work, ideas, opinions and contribute them to the greater community through blogs, personal websites, and social media. I have watched the quality of work and engagement greatly jump up when students know that what they are doing will be public. They pay close attention to their writing and how their ideas are being presented because there are external motivators put into place. It is possible that the capturing and digitizing of student work and assessment may be the answer to the problem of universities basing their admittance policies on students performance on standardized tests. If we are able to capture student capabilities and display them to universities in a way that is efficient for the universities to comb through, it will revolutionize education.
For my own personal learning, the ability to curate information in the form of articles, research studies, Youtube videos, podcasts, websites, apps, etc. has provided the most significant leap forward in gaining knowledge, skills, inspiration, and developing analytical skills. There are so many curation applications available right now that education, for the most part, has not utilized to their highest function. Here is a list, to name a few, that I use on a daily basis and try to model with my students:
Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube (creating playlists), DocHub, Evernote, Trulia (I’m looking to buy a house), iTunes Podcasts, Anchor…
The power of many of these apps is two-fold. Not only is the user organizing their thoughts and pertinent information but they are able to share these collections with other, like-minded people, in their communities of practice. The information age is here and has been here for quite some time, however, we rarely learn in schools, how to gather and utilize the information that is available.
D. Are their barriers (cultural, economic, et al.) that might impact your vision?
The barriers that exist that may impact my vision are mainly cultural. Not because of differing cultures from around the world but that of the education culture. The culture and systems of education that so many of us are locked into. Much of this culture is preconceived notions of what education must be and the unwillingness to change. One of these preconceived notions, that I spoke of earlier, is the idea that all students need to present their ideas and work in the same way, i.e. taking a test or writing a paper. The taking of the SAT that determines whether a student gets into a good school or a mediocre school. There are the notion that students should move up with their age group when they are clearly above or well below the level of their peers. The scheduling of courses being 45 minutes to 90 minutes per subject as well as the having extended summer holidays where students lose much of the knowledge that they had gained during the school year. These barriers are perceived ones, in that they are not set in stone but have been utilized for so long that they are not questioned, however, they are significant barriers. Creating change on the scale that is desired would be a massive undertaking. I’m trying to make these changes within my small school and have run into many entrenched individuals who are very set in their understanding of what education should be or are simply comfortable in the job that pays them decently and will put no effort into aiding reform.
E. If you were appointed as the global technology czar, what would be your first order of business? How would you know if you were successful?
My first order of business would be to set standards of required capabilities that teachers must demonstrate on the integration of technology into their classrooms. I see on a daily basis that the barrier between successful integration is generally not the lack of access to the software or specific hardware but the lack of understanding about the available applications that the software and hardware have that apply directly to the teachers and their practice.
A shift of focus would need to happen in teacher training colleges preparing new teachers to be adaptable and have the skills to continually stay abreast of new technologies that become available.
It is my contention as well that the most important professional development for current teachers would be to focus on technology integration into their own practices. Once teachers are able to search for communities of practice using technology they will be able to expand any other focus they may have for their own professional development.
I will be able to gage the success of this initiative through measuring the amount and quality of self-decided professional development that teachers choose to engage in. I posit that if they have the skills and the knowledge of which tools work best for them they will much more willfully continue their own learning as they are connected with more and more communities that share and validate their own interests.
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