August+2012

Friday, August 17, 2012.
While shopping at the local super-mega-centre yesterday I spotted the local paper on the news stand. The headline stopped me: **School's in...LAPTOPS ON **

Yes, they really put the word "ON" in all caps and in red. Reading a little further down the front page I found the name of my school, Dakota Collegiate. Paper in hand I walked to the cashier, and for the first time in years I bought a paper.

For those wishing to read a free online version of the Winnipeg Free Press stories a quick [|Google News search of "Winnipeg laptop school"] will provide most of the mainstream coverage. While I am sure that more is going on in blogs and Twitter I have not really looked around much there yet.

So why does this story break now? Slow news week? We're into the "Back to School" season? I don't know. I do know that I can already distinguish a variety of voices in the mix- those concerned about equity and social justice, those wondering about testing and performance, and those who seem to think that Provincial Education policy is behind on all of this. These are the same concerns and themes I have been working through in my own practice as a teacher and a parent.

Back in September of 2010 I wrote to Nancy Allan, Minister of Education, to share my own enthusiasm about laptop learning in school systems in Alberta and New Brunswick. Both of those initiatives were very impressive, and I hoped that we could do more here in Manitoba as well.

Here is an excerpt from that letter:

// The students who graduate in Manitoba in 2020 will contribute to a society radically transformed by the technologies of the information age. Those who graduate in 2010 already face the task of continual re-learning as they experience the gaps that already exist between what is offered by our education systems and the realities of their social and economic lives. Several jurisdictions are looking at how they can do a better job to make education relevant, engaging, and powerful in order to best prepare students for the possibilities in a world we can hardly imagine right now. //

It is true that laptops cost money. It is also true that public education needs to be equitable and just. The problem is that the entire system of education is quickly becoming obsolete, just like my old VCR and my cassette player. While we can teach and learn using the old ways, doing so does not help any of our children prepare for a vastly different near future.

Imagine what 2020 might be like. Remember that the class of 2020 was born in 2002, and that they are currently about nine or ten years old today. If our current education system does not embrace new technologies, then this entire generation will have to learn these post-modern essentials of communication and commerce on their own, not guided by any teacher or any curriculum.

While I am in favour of customizing education, I worry that public education may become less relevant and less desirable, and will slowly deteriorate. The increasing level of decay in several American, British, and Australian public school systems should provide us with advance warning: provide relevant and engaging learning opportunities for students or they will opt out. Opting out takes many forms including flight to private schools, self-education and home schooling, and simply leaving school, or dropping out. Making a law to keep students in school until the age of 18 is a start, but providing meaningful education up to that age requires new thinking.

School systems are incredibly slow to change, which makes them solid and dependable. It also makes them less adaptable and able to move quickly to respond to a quickly changing world. Any large social system that can't adapt tends to lose momentum- companies fade (like [|Kodak]), churches shrink, and businesses, including the newspaper business, lose customers. I wonder about how rosy the picture is at the Winnipeg Free Press- I know that they no longer provide papers to high schools the way that they used to. Too expensive to supply papers for the [|Newspapers In Education (NIE)] program I was told. Instead, the Winnipeg Free Press is part of the [|NIE online] program now. A good move, but a bit ironic given the headline yesterday.

From my vantage point as a Teacher and a Dad, I can see that we are in the midst of huge systemic changes in education world-wide. These changes are not on the horizon- we are in that time of change now, and any planning or initiative will be a response. Getting ahead of these changes starts by allowing all students to bring to school what they already have, and providing caring and knowledgeable adults to guide the process of learning.

This Autumn I will continue to teach in a BYOD school, and I will be teaching grade 9 and 10 students. The grade 11 and 12 students in my classes are also welcomed (and encouraged) to bring their own computers to class too. This is the way forward for all of us; school supplies are not what they used to be, and neither are schools.