My Lent Activity

I have been struggling about what to do for Lent until tonight.  My lenten goal is to post a quality post to this blog once a day through Easter.  Will you help hold me to it? 

My first post is to direct you to Seth Godin's newly released manifesto on education.  I am 2/3 of the way through it and am agreeing with a lot of what he says.  In short, our education system was designed with the 1920s and 30s in mind.  It does a great job of producing workers for that time period.  Too bad it is 2012 now.

If you do read the manifesto, let me know.  I want to talk about it with some folks.    

My First Guest Podcast

I had an opportunity recently to be a guest on the Ed Tech Co-Op podcast.  This was my first podcast and my first guest appearance on anything.  We spent the 45 minute show discussing technology integration using a recent New York Times article as our focal point.  If you are an education technology integration specialist, interested in technology use in schools, or my mother, I highly recommend you check out the Episode 10 - Determining the Value of Tech in School.   

It was (insert computer program name)'s fault!

Why is it that we always blame the program when something goes wrong?  I have been surprised at how many times in the last few days I have heard people blame a computer program for supposedly not working.  The assumption is always that the computer messed up. 

Sometimes the program does make a mistake, but more often then not the error people experience is one that they caused.  User error happens more often than we are willing to admit.   

Why do we blame the program?  Did we have bad first experiences with computer programs that have tainted our view towards them for the rest of our lives or is it easier to blame the program because it cannot argue back with us? 

Please, when you make a mistake, own it.  Don't try to hide behind a computer program.

Trying, Failing, Learning, Succeeding

I went into my departments SharePoint  testing site today in order to try out a new data gathering configuration.  The testing site is the place where we try out our ideas before we run them live.  I hadn't been to this site for awhile and seeing older test items that I had worked on made me realize how much my knowledge of SharePoint has grown in the last year.  When I started my current position, I knew nothing about SharePoint.  Now I am the SharePoint data guy and one of the few people in my department who know the program really well.  The crazy thing is that I learned everything I know from using the program and trying things out.  What started as a reorganization project to help me understand how my department worked,  grew into site design work, and then morphed into creating custom data collection tools for the entire division.

I tell you this brief technical story because I think it illustrates the best way that humans learn things.  We learn by doing.  By getting our hands dirty and trying things out.  We learn by tackling real world problems.  I think our K-12 education system has, for the most part, lost sight of this fact.  Students do not receive enough opportunities to tackle real world problems.  A worksheet is not a real world problem.

There is one more point, equally important, from my SharePoint story.  I had a testing ground.  I had a safe place where I could try out designs, fail, learn from my mistakes, and prepare a product that would succeed when put into actual use.  Without that safe place to fail, I never would have been able to create something useful.  Failure was a critical component of my learning. 

The question on my mind right now, is how do we build schools where students can safely fail as they tackle real world problems so that they can successfully build things that change our world?   



 

The Technology Feedback Loop

Today I had the opportunity to see two sides of education.  I started the day observing two high school Algebra classes in preparation for a data gathering project.  During my observations, I was surprised by the amount of down time the students had through out the course of the period and how boring it was.  The students had a number of practice problems to do on paper, but when they finished they had to wait until a teacher could review the answers.  If a student came across a difficult problem, more often than not they didn't do it, because they knew they could just wait for the teacher to review the answer.  During those periods of waiting their engagement with the content was lost.  In today's age of instant information and responses, this method seemed so antiquated.

On the flip side, later in the day I was able to participate in an iPod lesson with third grade students where they were practicing fractions.  Even though one of the apps we used had some really difficult problems, the students continued to try them.  They didn't lose focus and were really able to persevere through out the lesson.  I believe this has a lot to do with the immediate feedback that the app based practice provides.  Students didn't have to wait.  They could try a solution.  If it didn't work, they learned from their mistakes and tried again.  I didn't see the same frustration and lack of effort.   

I spent some time today thinking about how we can make the iPod example more of a reality in schooling.  I want to leverage technology to make learning more personal, exciting, and immediate.  We have the tools to do it.  We just need to find the right combination, put it together, and make it happen.   That is my goal.