What Happens When We Discover We Upgraded Our Technology for All the Wrong Reasons

Growing up I dreamed. We all dreamed. We all knew the phrases. "Bases loaded, two outs, bottom of the ninth, down by three, look who's coming to bat." We could smell the air, feel the tension, hear the sounds of the game. It was a game of individuals. In that moment we would see ourselves: the pitcher, the catcher, the bat, and the ball. The rest faded to black for we dreamed an individual's dream. It was our dream and it probably ends with us. My sons, like many other children, don't dream this dream. They don't watch baseball. They enjoy going to a game in the same way I enjoy going to the theater. Every once in a while it's a fun experience. It was my grandfather's game, my father's game, and my game. But it's not their game and not their friends game either. 

As I watch movies, shows, and games on the television, in the background plays Stampylonghead. The sounds of video game walkthroughs play as I watch the heroes of my generation dance in front of me. The clash of time occurs and in the end the art of my generation will be replaced by the art of theirs. Who knew that the Fred Savage masterpiece, The Wizard, would foretell of the direction entertainment would go. However, as the Amazon purchase of the Twitch Gaming Network for one billion dollars demonstrates, perhaps the future in sports entertainment is not on ESPN but rather youth watching youth play video games. 

In the past three years education has had two forces driving the need to upgrade our digital devices. The primary urgency has been the Common Core State Standards assessments including PARCC and SMARTERbalanced. The second force has been SAMR. SAMR, a methodology by Dr. Rueben Puentadura that analyzes the role of technology in learning. SAMR looks at the learning experience and identifies how the experience is a substitution, augmentation, modification, or redefinition of the prior learning experience. The interesting thing is that these two forces are at odds. The standards and assessment group drives us towards skills of the knowledge economy. How much information can you know? How can we trick you with confusing language on the test? How can we get you to write so that our robograders can read it and assess it accurately? The funny thing is, when was the last time any of us in the work world wrote the five paragraph essay? When was the last time any of us in the work world did the research paper with note cards and highlighters to write the five page paper. However, the PARCC and SMARTERbalanced assessments are driving educational purchasing decisions. 

As I start this next dialogue, let me put my biases on the table. In our district we are both an Apple and Google shop. We actively use and promote Google Apps for Education and use Apple products to access them. As a district, we have earned recognitions from Apple and our leaders, myself and our Director of Innovative Technology and Learning, are both Google Certified Teachers. Simply put, we are not currently a Microsoft shop. That being said, if the Common Core State Standards assessments were driving my purchasing decisions, I would have no choice but to purchase Chromebooks. Simply put, PARCC doesn't currently allow us to use the iPad Mini or the Nexus 7 to participate in the assessment. Furthermore it doesn't allow us to use a tablet at all without the keyboard. This is really interesting as most often (as Stevenson and New Trier are finding out) students prefer the tablets but also choose not to use the keyboards. Their work world is not ours. In a world in which cost is the driver, schools have no choice but to choose the Chromebook. 

The trick is that my children's world is not my world. They live in a world in which the Washington Post was saved by Amazon owner Jeff Bezos and the New York Times is up for sale. They are going into the world in which Youtube, Khan Academy, and Lynda.com share how to videos on how to do everything. Their writing is not 2,000 word essays but expository scripts that balance humor, visuals and media. They need the world of SAMR, one in which their products are redefined for another generation. Just this week, Educational Technology and Mobile Learning organized the Google Apps in the SAMR Framework. The interesting thing about this poster, is that in order to redefine the learning, the apps require us to work with others. The tools are often not best on the underpowered Chromebook but ask us to interact with a world through visuals. Mobile cameras like those found on the tablet. Video creation, touch interaction, music making are all part of redefinition. Tasks very poorly done on a Chromebook.

I live and teach Sunday School in a Chromebook district. We share 125 students between five fifth grade classes and we invite the children to Bring their Own Devices to Sunday School. We have watched for 12 weeks now and only three times has a Chromebook come to Sunday School. All by the same child. Every other time, the children self-select either no device, a tablet (most often iOS but there have been a couple of Fires and Nooks), or a phone (mostly iOS but some Android). They prefer, when given the choice to research, read, write, and create on mobile platforms. They send in writings via email and google docs. They make songs and videos. They create and redefine the learning each week. A majority are required to bring Chromebooks to school on a daily basis, yet when it is their own learning, their own choice, their opportunity to select, they choose mobile over portable for their future.

Questions remain about the cost-benefit of digital learning. In the ways we currently measure learning, the balance sheet may not tip in the right direction. The question remains whether these tools truly measure the outputs we need to create within our learners. Does the product of a standardized test truly predict the value a student will bring to our society? There is no question that cost is always a consideration, yet cost is relative. In 1984, a 19 inch Television and a VCR cost $868, nearly $2000 in the current economy after being adjusted for inflation. Yet one of those ended up in almost every American household. When making our purchasing decisions, we need to think of not simply of the test but what we want for our children's learning and their future.

My sons spent yesterday creating levels in Geometry Dash. In a world in which they commonly argue, they spent nine hours refining levels, creating new ones, and receiving comments from other Geometry Dash players in the world. They were creative, collaborative, and found an authentic audience. The oldest one wants permission to create a youtube channel so he can share his let's play game walkthrough videos. He wants to make multi-media expository products. I'm not ready for that yet, but he is. While we plan for assessments of an era and economy past, at least they are preparing for their future.

The Wizard

Stories of Us

I realized this past week, that my sixth grader reads my blog. It shouldn't be a surprise considering that as an entering kindergartener he sat over my shoulder and that of my wife's and read our email. What surprised me was that he was actually interested in the contents and was making a point of actually reading it. So, Cameron, while these stories and conversations each week may not always make sense, please know that each dialogue is a brick in the palace that I hope to build for you, your friends, your children, and your children's friends.

My dad is one of the smartest people I know. I would say that he's the smartest, but between a family uncle who went to Harvard Law and some of the interesting, or at least odd, people he introduced me to from Argonne and the University of Chicago, I think it is safe to say at least he is among a group of very smart people I know. He doesn't often share stories from his childhood, as he never wanted us to compare our lives to his, but occasionally he drops a fun nugget for us to learn from or at least laugh with. One of his stories was of the economics class in undergraduate which he got something like 30% on the test. He explained that with the "curve" it was a "B." Moreover, students had gotten less than zero because they had missed the extra credit questions on the test and the professor subtracted points for the errors on that question also. He shared that he hadn't known the extra credit so he simply didn't bother to answer the question. I remember being stunned, this from the guy who missed one on the SAT didn't know the extra credit, 30% being a B. Sure, it was the 60's but there certainly were some interesting grading practices.

One of our coaches shared a story of her two children in high school taking the same class at the same time. They both were assigned the same project and being children of the same household took two completely different approaches. The youngest, a studious worker, began working that night. For a week she researched, wrote, and toiled. A week later she submitted the assignment and earned 100 points. The elder son waited to start the assignment until 9pm on Sunday night and whipped it out in an hour. He turned his product and earned a 95. At home that night at the dinner table he looked at his sister and his parents and simply asked, 5 points, was it worth it?

I was a 3.0 student in high school and college. Exactly 3.0. There was a reason for this. After floundering my first semester at Downers Grove South, my dad simply told me that if you want to drive, you need to earn the good student discount for car insurance and that requires a 3.0. Immediately that next semester I raised enough GPA points to bring my Freshman year average to 3.0 and maintained that average at exactly that point for the next 7 years. For every C there was an A. I calculated exactly what points I needed to have in order to maintain that average each semester. For car insurance, it was worth the 3.0. For everything else your work didn't matter. I learned a lot. I shared a lot. I simply created just enough product to insure I kept my car insurance.

That's the funny thing about grades. We want to see them as motivators, but they're not. They are just ways of ranking the output. They truly don't tell us how much someone is learning, but rather what hoops you are willing or unwilling to do. Pernille Ripp wrote an amazing article earlier this month in MindShift about how she has made the choice to become the change we need to occur. She looked deeply into her sole about her classroom practices and the learning environment and opportunities we need to create. The best part of the article was that it was shared with me by a coach and a 5th grade teacher that is working herself to become the change her students need her to be in order to promote their growth as learners, not 5th graders.

As I look at my work in my current district, I think of my legacy as a student that wandered its halls and what my legacy will be as a leader that went through its buildings. I reflect on the great heritage and our amazing work with assessment, 1:1 learning, our biliteracy program, and content area instruction. I look at the children of my friends growing up who sit within the rooms of our schools and I see the opportunities we are creating. I look at all of our activities working together, and wonder which thing will make the difference. I look into the big sea that is our district and wonder which stone thrown into the water will truly send the ripples through that cause the change that enhances their lives as learners. I am pretty sure that stone was thrown this week. In a district of 5000 students and 350 teachers, 100 children didn't receive a math grade. Three teachers made the choice to send home a progress report that simply had what the children had learned and what they needed to learn next. A simple binary list of you either have this or you need to continue to work on it. A two-page document whose story is not that of the grade or what was covered in this quarter but rather what we are working on, what you are done with, and what you need to work on that. Half of those students are 5th graders who through dialogues with their teachers didn't ask what would we do without grades but rather when will we have this for everything else. Half of those students are kindergartners who perhaps will never know what it is to fail math but rather be always pushing themselves to learn more math. The biggest question amongst the parents to the principal was what will the local video store do for the free movie that children earn with A's in the class. He replied to them, we'll figure it out.

I am so proud of this risk led by these teachers. I am so proud of world of learning and expectation they are creating for our students. And I hope, as Cameron reads this blog he will realize that his mom and I never care what the grade is but rather has he learned it. We are unwilling to bend about him not needing corrections because he got 5 points off nor are we willing to scream when he gets a C after studying for days. What we expect is for him to learn it, understand it, and be able to communicate it. For us, it is not about the rank but rather the learning. These are our bricks we add to your house. We hope it is a glorious palace you build.

Oral Exam

A Lack of Vision

Each of us aims to create products that will delight our clients. We want to stun them with the ways we have in a cost-efficient manner innovated in order to create a unique product that fills their desires. We look for employees that will bring ideas and talents to the table so that we can develop new ideas, new products, and reach new clients. Helping grow our businesses, our industries, and our success. This is a simple goal that truly hasn't changed since the 1920's. What has changed is our technologies to reach new clients, capacities to build new products, and our ways to interact with each other. Information, once a scarcity, is now something in abundance. We can have all the knowledge in the world in an instant but can we understand what the client needs, work collaboratively to maximize our talents to fulfill this need, and communicate back to the client this is your product and this is how it works.

In a knowledge economy, information-based assessment made sense. The quicker you could get information, the quicker you could react to the client's needs and make a solution. Standardized-assessments, requiring the good-old #2 pencil could quickly assess what each person knew and identify if they knew enough. The trope used to be, there are no trick questions, you can either do it or not. The funny thing is technology has changed dramatically, the interchange within our world changed dramatically, knowledge is no longer at a premium, and yet our tests merely evolve. Our world has tools straight out of Star Trek, computers that answer questions at a verbal whim, communication devices that fit in our ears and our pockets and can call across the globe, we can land spacecraft on a comet over 300 million miles away. Yet our tests are simple substitutions for the prior generation of Scantrons. Now the questions openly try to trick you with linguistic complexity. The questions build on each other. There are videos integrated. One writes, excuse me types, a little bit of extended responses. Our students will sit for hours demonstrating skills almost useless in the modern workplace. They will sit in classes for hundreds of hours preparing skills almost useless in the modern workplace so they can be assessed by these tests. We can spend billions of dollars and quite frankly the creators of Get Smart or Inspector Gadget could have done better.

See, in those shows, the agent was given a mission to complete. A real task in which they really had to do something. Our lack of vision has created substitutional exams within which we have traditional knowledge based tasks and assessments for a world that requires very little of this. An assessment system that had vision would have used those billions of dollars to have students work together to make real products. Wondering how it could look? Try this:

A school receives 20 boxes for their 79 fourth grade students. On each box are 3 to 4 student ID numbers selected at random by the computer. Each group of 3 to 4 students needs to work together to complete the project inside. They have a week to do it. Inside the box are directions and outcome expectations. The project itself can be both explicit in some details and vague in others. At the end of the week, the children fill the box with their product/project and send it off. 

This is real world. One works with people in a group identified by someone else to make a product that someone different requested. One doesn't have a person to constantly ask questions to but instead has infinite access to any knowledge and resource around them. Instead of being bored staring at a screen or a Scantron, our students could be meaningfully assessed based on direct measurable outcomes. Instead of limited knowledge and skill assessment we could be breeding a system that promotes knowledge, understanding, communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. There are lots of ways to spend a few billion dollars. Just ask Steve Ballmer. It is our lack of vision that limits our ability to spend them well.

You're NASA

Are We Listening?

   Initially, I thought it was just me. I'd sit down at home, "listen" to my bride present a situation, and quickly share with her several possible solutions. This would quickly upset her and over time I learned that she wasn't looking for me to be a problem-solver but rather simply a sounding board as she explored situations and considered a diverse set of opportunities that could possibly occur next. I'd love to say that I extinguished my problem-solver tendencies but perhaps the right word is reduced my problem-solver nature. When I'm sick, in a rush, or doing other things I quickly slip back in to problem-solver mode and I'm off to the races again missing the messages my bride is sharing. As I said, initially I thought this was just me, but as I have had the opportunity to work with hundreds of adults in a multitude of districts I began to realize that being a problem-solver is a cultural role in our society. In my region of the universe, there is this attempt to treat every situation as a task. You have this occurring, here take two of these each day for the next week. Let me know how it works for you. How much time do we sit and listen?
    The listening component is not limited to oral communication. As writers, there has been a definitive move towards becoming more formulaic. The formula, a structured argumentative essay, concisely presenting research based components to support our point of view, begins with the classic hamburger paragraph writing. The 6+1 traits writing that swept the nation was simply based upon the writing rubric for standardized assessments. As the world has become more integrated, we have put a premium on even more concise forms of communication. Texts and tweets limited to 140 characters and possibly a link or a picture have become prevalent forms of interactions. The reality is that when young people text and tweet, they text and tweet a lot. In 2013, US Smartphone holders between 18-24 sent and received nearly 4000 texts per day. So while each text was short, the multitude created a significant level of interaction and dialogue.  Questions remain regarding the quality of communication? Is this sharing, listening, understanding another's point of view? What are the cultural norms behind this?
   Different languages have different structures. This impacts our interactions and understandings. Beeman and Urow in their discussion of biliteracy frameworks discuss the difference between communication styles of native Spanish speakers primarily from Mexico and typical native English speakers in the United States. They identify the frequent tendency in the native English speaker to be sequential and concise, whereas the cultural norms of the native Spanish speakers primarily from Mexico were to explore situations, discuss relationships from a variety of perspectives, and require the audience to cultivate numerous inferences. These are two distinctively different approaches to communication. In a world in which native English speakers are quickly trying to identify and solve problems, we have multilingual kids that are culturally set to explore and elaborate conversations patiently providing nuanced dialogue.
   What happens when we encounter cultures in which the organization of the the language changes, from subject verb object to subject object verb? What does this mean in terms of others interpretation of our actions? What happens when we push students who are culturally set to be linguistic explorers into the concise sequential guidelines of our 6+1 auto-graded writing rubrics? Are we measuring differences in language application and cultural norms, by simply requiring writing in a methodology that one does not naturally order their thoughts in?
   We talk about the Internet causing the world to become more connected. In many respects it is. However, it is still in it's infancy. The reality is 55% of web content is currently written in English whereas only 5% of the world speaks English as it's first language. As mobile devices expand and more people have access more people will seek to use and create at least local content in their native language. Communication from our perspective is limited by our own cultural norms and ideas. As we prepare our students for the world, we may need to rethink our styles to embrace wider methods of communication and a discovery of norms and contexts. We can begin this adventure today, with our partners, the parents of our students that we meet in conferences, and our colleagues. Instead of trying to quickly solve the problem, lets ask open questions and see where the conversation takes us. There may be deeper learnings we discover.

Fresh Prince: Google Translated

   

Who Own's It?

  The end of the quarter is here. One could here the rush to complete assignments. The groveling for extra credit. The arguing for this point or that point. The accusations of "I turned it in," "You forgot to grade it," and occasionally, "Look, here it is with a marking why don't you have it in your grade book?" It happens all across the country and yet we do nothing to stop it. We own this as teachers, principals, district leaders, parents, and students. And yet, we never ask the critical questions: Did the child learn it? Is learning time bound?
  What is it that we want from learning? Is it to momentarily learn a skill? Is it the ability to cultivate a solution to a problem? Is it to be able to identify a piece of information? Is it the ability to understand information and to develop a viewpoint? When we figure out what we want the child to learn then we start to realize that there are important truths that are neither assignment bound nor time bound. These are things that the child must have when they walk away from the class. Skills and concepts for life. One example of this I have seen comes from my child's 6th grade Social Studies class. In one assignment he needed to be able to argue the point of view of Frederick Douglass. He needed to understand the counter-arguments and have answers for them. This was one of the few activities I have seen in which he needed to synthesize a life skill. It was something that couldn't simply be answered by Wolfram-Alpha, Google Search, Wikipedia, or Photomath.
   Once we realize that all of the content knowledge is constantly at one's fingertips, it becomes clear that our multitude of content-based assignments are becoming worthless. We need to leave the time when we generated multiple activities for multiple grades. The time where points matter is gone. We are entering a period where constructed learning is essential for our children and their future. Chris Bronke, English Department Chair at Downers Grove North High School, shared with our team that during the first two months of school he had 2 grades so far. Children were working on complex tasks and repeatedly adapting and revising their assignments. The process involved deep development, reflection, and frequent revision. His role was to ensure the children grew and maximized their learning. He owns that each child MUST learn the critical concepts in his class. He owns that learning is essential. And with the students together they own cultivating learning experiences that are as meaningful to the student as the learning process is to the teacher.
   Jon Heldmann, Math Department Chair at Downers Grove North High School, also met with our team. He worked on these concepts, Habits of Mind, ways to approach math in order to understand the problem before us and develop a plan and methodology to solve it. In this journey he spoke of a single problem taking multiple days to solve. He wasn't talking about 1-31 the odds happening each night, but the challenge of looking at a situation and figuring out what tool to do. Computers have been able to solve most every math problem I have ever seen in my life. We have moved past the era where my father stacked Fortran cards to program his calculations. We have moved past the time when I sat in the back of the room and pulled out excel on my laptop to calculate the answer. We live in a society within which my 11 year-old knows he can type the equation into Wolfram-Alpha and the answer will appear. He hasn't mention yet the Photomath app within which he could simply take a picture and get the answer. Knowing him, I give it a week or two before that happens. These tools are great but none of them will help a child develop the Habits of Mind. When we stop seeing math as a chain of skills and start seeing it as a thinking process then we will be preparing learners for their future. The tools to solve the chain of skills have been built and are available for less than $2.99 for anyone interested.
   We have talked for as long as I can remember about our curriculum being a mile-wide and an inch-deep. By simply teaching skills and content knowledge it has been. The trouble is that all of those things are now available, frequently for free, to anyone who is interested. Learning needs to be about more. Learning needs to be children applying essential processes that can't be recreated by the computer. It needs to be less about points and grades and more about what a child synthesize. We need to present challenges for children to solve and remove the artificial time boundaries to solving them. The end of the quarter shouldn't mean anything. It should be a demarkation of this is what the child has done so far, these are things they are working on, and these are things that we will work on next. In this world extra credit and grade groveling aren't necessary because it is clear that one is providing a status report on the journey. The learning itself is essential and their is no option not to accomplish it. If one needs to identify a child is Failing a concept, than my recommendation is that we give the Incomplete. For if they fail, we all have failed to help the child learn. If it is Incomplete, we all own the importance of completing the task.

Prime Numbers