The Most Exciting Blog You'll Ever Read

Or, the Required Ole Miss EDSE 557 Education Manifesto Response

Part I: Describe how educational technology should be used to support teaching and learning [50-100 words]

It appears that educational technology should exist to unburden teachers and students of the most rote and mundane aspects of a school day.  Having freed the students to expand their educational horizons, ed. technology supports open-ended and simulated real-world experiences.  For this to be effective, teachers must break from the "student-as-bucket" approach and reorient themselves not as strict pedagogues, but as "facilitators" instead.

Part II: Cognitive tools and their association with educational technology [50-100 words]

This has already been mentioned above.  Cog. tools expose students to "authentic" learning in the hopes that more of the education sticks in their heads that way.  Many "authentic" environments will end up being computer simulations or other technology-dependent constructs.  Voila! as the French would say.  Here is ed. tech's entry point into the cog. tools discussion.  They are, or can be, synonymous with each other.

Part III: My crack at a learning activity that uses elements of ed. tech, cog. tools, and "authentic" learning environments [150-200 words]

I fly the kids in an airplane (technology!) to the British Lake District (authentic!) where we read Wordsworth's Lake District poems in the same setting in which they were written.  The students are unburdened of having to mentally-construct Wordsworth's images, insofar as the images will be visibly in front of the students.

Or...

Using an LCD projector and associated ed. tech tools (perhaps a TV, an open-ended documentary series? hmm?) I can virtually-reconstruct the Lake District and Wordsworth's life there.  The students could even go on self-guided virtual tours (by using computers!!!!) of the area in order to locate particular geographical landmarks that Wordsworth mentions in his poems.

Hooper-and-Reiber, were they to walk in on this classroom, would wet themselves with joy.  Students creating their own learning environments, guiding themselves through a virtual Lake District tour, free to choose any of the Lake Distict poems that tickle their fancy and then research those at their leisure.  A teacher who is free of pedantry, acting as a facilitator to instill love of poetry--not just rote facts of birth and death!!!--in the students' heads.  etc. etc. etc.

Part IV: Assessing Technology in K-12

    1. How and why is the integration of technology succeeding in K-12? [50-100 words]

          Why is it succeeding?  I cannot answer this question until "success" is defined.  If "success" means "technology is omnipresent in the classrooms", then the answer why is because technology is an easily quantifiable metric: in the absence of more enlightened methods of ascertaining school quality, the presence and numbers of 21st century technology is an easy tally mark to make.

    2. How and why is the integration of technology failing in K-12? [50-100 words]

       On the other hand, if "success" means what Hooper and Reiber want it to mean, if "success" is to mean students and teachers who depend on technology to transform the learning experience into something orgasmic, then K-12's integration of technology is still, well, less than tumescent.  The reasons why are easy, Hooper and Reiber mentioned them all: teachers who are scared of technology; teachers who are untrained in the uses of technology; and administrators whose focus is solely on putting technology in the school but lack the stamina to see that the technology, once placed, is efficiently used.  At the same time, Hooper and Reiber were disingenuous to compare the technological integration of doctors and dentists to the integration of teachers.  We all know that the business world is NOT the academic world, so demanding a similar hard-driving charge towards efficiency in education is wide of the mark.  Plenty of students can learn all they need to know without the use of simulated "authentic" worlds.  I mean, the entire historical human population prior to 1980 did alright, and nary was a computer to be found amongst them.

    3. Based on my teaching position, what must be done to make ed. tech central to the educational experience? [100-200 words]

       Here's the laundry list of obvious suspects: train teachers better, train administrators better, completely fund the technological etc. etc. etc, change the school culture concerning the possibilities of technology.

       But if you are asking for my personal opinion about my unique situation, then my answer is this: No one climbs Everest without a base camp; no one kills a deer without first scouting the area and putting up a stand; no one builds a house without a blueprint and a foundation.  Until we have a reliable internet connection, computers that can consistently log on to the school network, and sufficient space for to do whatever needs to be done, very little ed. tech. integration will occur.  Pedestals and columns can be built high even with a narrow base, but they too easily fall: until the fundamentals are taken care of, it will not matter how many educational simulation websites the district has purchased.  Until ease of use is assured, ed. tech. cannot be integrated.

And once our base is solid, you can go back and deal with that laundry list of obvious suspects.