May+2012

May 15th, 2012.
As our first "official" pilot year of BYOD finishes up at Dakota I find myself wondering about where we're headed next. When I talk to the other teachers it seems to me that the word "pedagogy" keeps coming up. We've had a really successful year of implementing this program- students are using their machines in class, they are more comfortable with the technology, teachers are figuring out relevant ways to use it with the students, but sometimes the whole grand experiment seems to need a larger purpose or greater cause.

I know that local teachers like [|Chris Harbeck] have harnessed ed-tech to pursue social justice causes through micro-financing. I think that social justice could be an over-arching theme that we could use in our school planning. I know that the Province is strongly interested in promoting sustainable development in education, and I think that figuring out how to use ed-tech to that end might also be good. Sometimes we bat around the "problem based learning" (PBL) sorts of approaches that we see in [|High Tech High] and [|MET schools]. We have not really grabbed on to any of these larger philosophies, but maybe it is time we should.

I'm glad that our school division has decided to hire a professional research company to establish some base-line data about the pilot. I know that [|Proactive Information Services] is a well respected research firm in our neighborhood. They've been conducting research at our school, and I hope that we all get to take a look at their final report whenever they finish up. My sense of it is that what they'll find out is that year one has been a very successful pilot when compared to the five broad goals of the pilot:


 * 1. Increase students’ knowledge and understanding in all curricular areas by harnessing**
 * the power of technology in the classroom**


 * 2. Enhance the skills students need to live successfully in the 21st century**


 * 3. Optimize the advantage of students’ ownership of—and readiness to use— personal**
 * technology devices to learn, communicate and collaborate in school**


 * 4. Increase students’ desire to learn beyond the school day**


 * 5. Increase students’ responsible and appropriate use of technology**

[]

I know that we are hitting these goals, because I see that happening in my classroom, and I talk about it with my colleagues. Still, I end up wondering about the bigger picture. Where is all of this headed?

Tonight while monitoring the #edchat hashtag in Twitter I was struck by the number of teachers who were trying to figure out how to use Social Media (SM) and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) ideas in their schools. Sure this was the topic of the stream, but it felt a bit like missing the forest for the trees. I finally Tweeted into the steam myself with this: media type="custom" key="18068296" Maybe macrame and 8 tracks is a bit of an overstatement. Maybe not. I sense that all of the tech we use now will certainly seem a little quaint in just a few years. The link in the Tweet is for the Home Page of a cool Edu-Conference in Hong Kong next month. In part, I think they are on target because they are looking at learning analytics, the realm of George Siemens & others. While I'm not convinced that the learning __//**is**//__ the network, as Dr. Siemens asserts, I do think that flesh & blood teachers had better get savvy with data crunching tools that can measure 30,000 data points a minute while monitoring flesh and blood students who are tuned in to an electronic learning network, and maybe wearing [|Google glasses] and some kind of "learning vest" made of [|fabric] that measures & records their responses.Education has much to learn from big data.

No matter how much the technology changes, there will still have to be good reasons to educate people (like preserving civilization and the gains we've all made so far) and good methods for passing along what we know. I'm just worried that our methods are evolving much more quickly than our reasons. Maybe I need to go back and read a bit of [|John Dewey] or [|Nel Noddings] again. Maybe I'm just a bit worried we'll find the trees, get lost in the forest, and never really find our way out again.

On May 18th our school is having our final Professional Development day of the year. May is a frenetic month in a big high school, and people are tired. We have to make sure that all of our students finish well, exams are around the corner, and I hope that we can take our concentration away from the details of the day to look a little further down the road.

What should we look at beyond the five goals of the pilot? How are we helping the young people in our classes to be ready for the challenges they are about to face? How can technology better equip them to face newly emerging challenges? Big questions, but relevant ones as well.

Next year all of the grade nines and tens will carry computers to class - about 500 of the 1100 students in the school. Pretty incredible. Now I hope we can figure out how to help them to know how to interact with the entire world using this awesome electronic window into our shared future.