I could use a set of those

While we are thinking about going 1:1, maybe we could get them to throw in a set of Touches too.

Tech and Talk in the Classroom

Holidays are always fabulous. This holiday, however, offered a unique professional opportunity. We saw about 65 former students, all of whom have started university or are finishing high school. This provided us with a chance to do some informal yet invaluable field research on education and on technology in education.

Before detailing our findings, it’s important to describe the ‘subject group’. They actually form two groups. The first is made up of my grade four/five students from an urban charter school in Los Angeles. This school is a successful public school in a neighbourhood and district of many unsuccessful schools. Students at the school do not have to pass any kind of entrance exam but do have to maintain a decent academic and attendance record to stay in the school. Some of these students were part of an accelerated program so that they enrolled in university as second year students. These students are all in university now, most of them in large public universities in California.

The other group of students is from the small private school in Pasadena where we were first middle school teachers and later heads of the middle and high schools. This school is small in both total numbers and in class sizes and would be characterized by most people as a liberal institution. Its methods aren’t radical, but the politics and attitudes of most students and families would be considered liberal. There is no entrance exam at the school and, compared to most private schools in the area, it takes a very wide range of students of different abilities. The students we reunited with from this school are either finishing high school or have started university. They attend a wide range of schools including community colleges, public universities and small liberal arts schools.

Both groups of students would likely be considered quite technologically literate. In most cases, much of what they do using computers grew out of their own interests and mastery occurred through practice on their own. Some of the teachers they had through high school embraced digital tools in education and some had little interest in them.

In discussing what school is like for them now, we asked our students many questions about technology use in the classroom. We were very surprised by the strength of their reactions against digital tools being used in the classroom. In almost every case, students lamented situations in which they could not engage in discussion (as is the case for those at University of California schools where introductory classes are large). In the case of those students in small schools with small classes, students heaped scorn upon the idea that they should be using computers in class. They were overwhelming in their desire to talk.

They saw talk as an essential underpinning of their understanding and as an essential way of working with their peers. They embraced classes in which teachers lead good discussions and complained about those in which their means of expression of ideas was primarily electronic.

We described images of university classrooms that we had discussed in our courses in which students were all sitting with their laptops open. Virtually unanimously, their reactions were negative and included the following points:

· They know they would not pay attention in such a situation.

· They want to talk and discuss.

· They want to hear what their professors/teachers have to say.

· Multi-tasking meant incomplete attention to each task.

Though I have to confess that I am happy to hear their responses since they reflect some of my own beliefs, I also have to admit that I was quite surprised at the forcefulness of their reactions. Some students were actually quite passionate about the need to talk as a group in class. Others found some of the uses of digital tools to be needless intermediate steps that postponed important discussion.

I know that for me, this reinvigorates my commitment to discussion and talk in the classroom.

Texting: Another Reason not to Call

I have always hated talking on the phone. Well. actually that's not quite true. There was a short period in Grade 7 when I was on the phone for hours at a time. Aside from that, approximately, six month period, I have avoided talking on the phone. Email was a dream come true but had its limits as everyone started to carry cell phones.

Then I discovered SMS. A dream come true. Instant communication but no chatting. Well it turns out that there is an unexpected benefit to texting for our students - better spelling! According to a study frequent texting requires a strong awareness of spelling rules even when non-standard spelling is used. So as long as our students can figure out that we don't want them writing that way for academic purposes, there is no harm in texting the hmwrk assignment.

c u l8r