The combination of a cart of laptops, a great idea and an AP European History teacher with a strong need to jump start his class does not necessarily result in 21st century learning. It is much more likely to demonstrate how easy it is to underestimate the long list of tricky little details that can torpedo a good idea.
This was the sort of plan that makes the Web 2.0er’s gush about “collaboration” and “communication”. Take an AP European History teacher-based lesson on the life of common people in the 17th century and provide the students with laptops so they could add notes to a lecture outline posted in Google Docs and chat in a Moodle class forum. Those of us who have attended professional development conferences have been doing this sort of “back-channeling” for a while and it seems worth it to see if students would participate more in a lecture if they could chat together about the subject during the lecture.
| “I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations which wouldn’t work.” Thomas Edison |
Why do we take it for granted that a person gets the most learning from a lecture if they sit there silently or quickly scribble out notes in a vain attempt to transcribe everything the instructor says? Would it make sense to have student suggest possible answers to questions in a chat room? Could the students who have trouble taking notes benefit from seeing the good note-takers in action? Even if we dismiss the “multi-tasking” myth of digital natives, we can be sure that even if they are not really good at it, they are at least more at home with it. Although they may end up paying more attention to the chat than the teacher, at least they won’t be daydreaming. And in the end, the teacher will know what they are doing in a chat, but won’t have any idea what is going on behind the eyes of a class of students just staring at the front of the room. |
That’s where the ideas hit the brick wall of reality. That reality includes a cow hidden in the corner of an English teacher’s room and no ability to get it out before one class ends and the other begins. It includes five machines in the cow that have not been charged and two that cannot connect to the Internet. It includes students who have not yet set up their Google accounts, and other who have an account, but do not have access to the lecture outline document despite having been invited to collaborate on it three times. It includes a Moodle chat forum than kicks the students out every eight minutes for no apparent reason. Top that off with a wireless bandwidth thinner than a dime and you have another example of how any one of a host of tricky little details can submarine a perfectly good idea.
We can take away from this little experiment the optimism that it will be easier next time because we know the tricky little details we have to conquer. More importantly though, those of us who advocate this sort of education should have an infinitely greater sympathy for those teachers we are trying to persuade to use these tools. Even though we are familiar with the solutions, the vocabulary and the intricate settings of wireless, Google accounts, bandwidth and chat rooms, we are still challenged in aligned them all to operate smoothly.
How do you think it feels to be someone who has no idea what we are talking about?
Infinitude 
I have run into similarly frustrating situations this year where my plans and ideas outpaced the hardware and software (or how previous users treated them). It kills me that we have all the technology that we do at our disposal, yet it’s still not enough to do what I do at home with no problems (e.g., use Twitter, for crying out loud).
I do empathize with those who are new to all these technological possibilities, and it’s more for their sake that I think these shortcomings need to be addressed. The “familiar folks” will usually either a) find a workaround, or b) as you said, be able to accurately troubleshoot for next time without being completely discouraged. It’s tough trying to run a PD opportunity, either on a large scale or one-to-one, and just watch the enthusiasm drain as I try to figure out why IE won’t let me edit a sample wiki.
By the by, we probably have a few common acquaintances. At one point, several folks in my department left to take positions at your school (I got here through your main site, via Dan Meyer’s blog).
Thank Damian, there’s a couple things I’ve learned since this emotional little screed. Not the least of which is that only ten people can simultaneously edit a Google Document, explaining why some students did not get into the lecture outline. The Moodle chat kick outs were never explained, but the dialogue that was there looked like a chat filled with students who are not used to using that environment for learning or exchanging ideas. It was a list of “hi”s and “look who is here”s and the other assorted banter one would expect from high school students. However, the notes in the collaborative Google outline documents were excellent and the revisions history evidenced a fair spread of students were contributing.
Although I will not make this a regular practice, I think that a good five or ten times a year would serve the students well. Sure there were be some who ride the coattails of others and just get their notes, but others who do not know how to condense information in notes will be able to see this valuable skill in action. Unfortunately, information dispensation holds a lot of ground in the AP curriculum, yet this necessary evil can be made a more valuable experience by requiring the students to engage the material in real time. Of course, it requires a teachers who takes it for granted that students will be tapping away through the whole presentation and not look at them.
As for the PD side, it’s two mountains to cross. The first is making to tools as reliable and easy to use as picking up a piece of chalk and scraping it on a blackboard and the second is developing the pedagogy that makes the most of them.