Middle School Science for the Future!

The two YouTube videos below are a part of a debate on the efficacy of interactive boards (read SMART boards) in the classroom. The speakers are policy makers for school districts as well as a representative from SMART technologies. They make many salient points.

My experience in this area would seem to bear these observations out. At my school we got SMART boards in about 4 years ago. At first we had only two for a staff of 20 teachers. I experimented with it but was given no training on how I might use it in my curriculum. I tended to use it at that point to display powerpoint notes presentations. None of the other teachers used the other board in their rooms on a daily basis for a variety of reasons.

Two years ago we had increased our SMART board population to 11. At this point almost any teacher could get a SMART board if they wanted to use one. Still when in the spring of that year I got a new class of students and began to write the procedure for the investigation we were about to conduct together in a Notebook one of my students responded enthusiastically, “Wow! All of my other teachers just use those to show movies!” I was floored.

This year we have had a turnover in staff and a few converts. About 5 of our staff now use SMART boards on a regular basis. They use them for a variety of reasons. Some show educational videos. Many use them for brainstorming ideas with students. They are also used to display lessons and go through them with students.

In my own teaching I use mine for a variety of things

• Giving instructions
• Saving lesson plans I can post online
• Collaborating with students
• Some powerpoints
• Demonstrating web 2.0 techniques
• Showing demonstrations of lab techniques….
• Many others

In the coming year I am experimenting with many more ideas in how I can use a SMART board to teach web 2.0 skills to my new students and to collaborate online with other classrooms.

In conclusion I guess that I would ask these experts how much time they have given teachers to learn to use their interactive whiteboards? Just like with any technology these have a definite learning curve. Whether or not you train teachers you also have to allow them time to learn about the technology you are putting in their hands and to develop their own ideas about how it will work best for them. Teachers are more resilient than we often make them out to be.

I was reading the blog Cosmic Variance and came across this post called Absorbed in which the author apologizes for not posting recently due to her utter absorption in her current work.  Below I am including a quote from the blog which I found illuminating:

This IS what science is like! When you get so caught up and so excited about something, that literally everything else in life gets put on hold. I’m very excited about this paper, and want to do my best job! I have 3 collaborators, 2 on East coast time, and one in Hawaii. Two of us are in charge of the master text file – me and a collaborator on the East Coast. He is a morning person and works on the file from 8 EDT until mid-afternoon. That means around 10 AM PDT he ships the file to me and I start my day, working until about midnight. Comments from the other 2 collaborators are coming in at all hours at a rapid pace. This means that the collaboration is literally working round the clock! We have a system set up, so we don’t get confused and mix up the “master file” for our paper. It hasn’t failed us yet…

She and her colleagues have set up their schedules so that they can write this paper as if they were sitting right next to each other when they are miles away!  this is a very interesting example of not only scientific process (authentic science work that could be shared with students) but of web 2.0 processes!

Today I have been reading several blogs by teachers, consultants and other techno-residents of the blog-o-sphere. I am constantly impressed and amazed by what students and teachers are able to achieve using this technology. Here are a few student blogs that are excellent examples of what students can do given the freedom, environment and tools to create “Just Yell” and “Fasion Freak”. Teachers and other blog-o-sphere techno-residents write very illuminating posts about technology and how it can be used or ought to be used in schools. Some bloggers that I find interesting are A Plethora of Technology by Barry Bachenheimer and Beyond School by Clay Burrell. Yet with all of these ideas and resources literally at my fingertips I look around at the feeble attempts I’ve made this year at introducing my students to Web 2.0. True it was just this year that I really woke up to the possibilities inherent in this interactive system, but as I sit and reflect now, attempting to renew both myself and my teaching for a new school year I am not sure what path my teaching will take.

I would like to say that I have mastered wikis and blogs and I am an innovative teacher, but the truth is that when I used this medium with my students we never got beyond regurgitation of web resources. I found myself mired in attempting to get them to not cut and paste information. I wanted them to be evaluating resources and thinking/writing new thoughts. When I did get them all to begin writing their own blogs in preparation for creating their own online science journals and projects we got mired down in the process of just getting each student an email address and a blog, let alone getting time in the computer lab for them to be able to do this. Even when I did get this done for a majority of my students I found myself giving regurgitative assignments. Needless to say I was disappointed by the results. I was doing basically the same thing with a new tool and expecting different results.

I am the designated SMART board “expert” at my school and I often tell my teachers that the SMART board just like any classroom tool will not automatically make you a better teacher. If you are a lecture only, regurgitation teacher without a SMART board then you will be a lecture only, regurgitation teacher with a SMART board. It is only a new tool. I feel the same way about using web 2.0 tools in my teaching and I fear I am not equal to the task.

When I took my students to the computer lab this year their reaction was mixed. Some enjoyed the chance to use skills they possessed in their learning process, but many looked at me as if I had taken their favorite toy and perverted it. Many of my current students come from places that have little or no internet access. They have not learned rudimentary online skills and consequently must learn to use a computer before they can learn with the computer. Its a little bit like learning to read.

I find myself faced with a different challenge. Before we can teach with this tool we must first teach the tool or nothing we do in class (or on the web) has relevance to the student. Just like students need to feel safe and comfortable in a classroom, they need to feel safe and comfortable online. This means that they they feel like they know what to do or at least how to find out what to do. In this new information age tech literacy (not just computers but things like GPS, cell phone…etc) is just as, or possibly more important than being able to read. They need to not only be able to read, but just as we teach them the structure of a language we need to teach them the structure of the web, its history, how information is stored and encoded, the difference between computer based and web based applications…. If we do not do these things as we educate our students the projects we assign them whether online or in a classroom will be irrelevant to them. They will have no bearing on their future lives. In other words we can teach in a very technorich environment, but unless we put the tools in their hands and teach them not only how to use them but how to learn the skills themselves what we teach in class will be irrelevant to their lives.

As a boarding school (grades 9-12) teacher I have found this predicament frustrating. I don’t see it getting any better in middle school dealing the reality of low incomes, limited home access, limited English proficiency and limited school access to technology. I am left with the feeling that I want to do wonderful things, but am not quite sure how to get there.

Help!