Dangling Flies and Moths

Dangling Flies and Moths: The Next Classroom Technologies

Gary West, Director of Computing Services

Greenwood School District 50

Greenwood, South Carolina

INTRODUCTION

A couple of years ago, the Tams sang background vocals for a great little tune that probably gets very little play on the Saturday night beach music radio shows. Like all great beach music tunes, the song is about love and life – and technology. It clearly expresses the way many of us feel about our understanding of today’s technology – not to mention future technologies:

“We’ve made it nearly twenty centuries

A bunch of monkeys with PHD’s.

Spun a web of communications

But it’s all still a tangle to me.

I can’t tell the spiders

From the dangling flies and moths,

I fell like some outsider,

Who seems to have his wires all crossed.”

Besides eighty-pound backpacks on fifty-pound kids, technology is one of the biggest problems in education today. It’s absolutely essential. We don’t use it as effectively as we should. Willingness among staff to learn to use it is inversely proportional to the number of years left to retirement. It costs a lot. And many of us feel like those dangling flies and moths …

Despite all the problems associated with using technology effectively in our classrooms, we have a responsibility to get it done. Our students need to develop technology skills and technology-based problem-solving strategies if they are to succeed in their lives or in their workplaces. The biggest barrier our students face for the future is our inability to help them develop those skills and strategies today.

In order for us – educators and parents – to improve, we must develop new understandings about the importance and application of technologies. We must then plan to help our students understand. Then, of course, we must find ways to cover the costs.

Below, we will talk about emerging technologies that can help us succeed and we will discuss changing the way we do business, through those technologies, so we can pay for it.

ARE OUR WIRES ALL CROSSED?

One of the things that scares us most about technology – at home or at school – is that our kids understand it better than we do. Sometimes we see them as the spiders – it’s really their web and we’re just trapped in it. That feeling will get worse for us. I don’t think that’s bad, necessarily; we just have to understand that it’s about to happen – and it’s about to happen very quickly.

I’ll use my cell phone as an example. Like any good consumer, I upgraded my phone when my service contract was renewed. I took the new phone home and spent several hours trying to figure out how to get names and phone numbers into it. I did learn – on my own, although accidentally – how to turn on the voice-activated dialing (now, I speak to the phone and it dials for me). Then I was ready to go anywhere, any time, knowing that I could communicate with significant others and that I could better control any emergency because of that ability to communicate.

My new phone was on the kitchen table one night when my daughter noticed it. She picked it up, held down a key for three seconds, and checked her Yahoo® email. Using my cell phone!

My first reaction was, “How’d you do that?” My second was, “How’d you know how to do that?” Then, I asked her to show me how to do it. She really enjoyed that teachable moment. (By the way, she learned how to do that from a school friend who has a cell phone exactly like mine.) Not only can I check email, it turns out, but I can get the news and weather, send and receive text messages as well as voice, and do a lot of other stuff I haven’t figured out yet. It’s all part of my basic service.

What’s the impact of my learning to check my email from my cell phone? The most basic answer is that kids already know how to do it. Those same kids have their cell phones with them wherever they go (my daughters never leave home without theirs – and we, their parents, want them to carry those phones whenever they go out).

In effect, the students at your schools are already carrying powerful tools of communication. They’re able to communicate verbally and digitally with the outside world – and they are able to do so without going through your school’s technology or network.

Is that bad? Probably not. Can we control it? Should we try? Probably not, to both.

We banned cell phones in our schools several years ago (we ban a lot of stuff we don’t understand, it seems). We forgot (or didn’t understand) that cell phones have valid purposes – communication and safety. However, following several incidents in which cell phones became important tools for dealing with dangerous situations – from kids letting parents know they were safe following a school disturbance to the heroism of the passengers on Flight 93 – parents and students have insisted that we change our attitudes – and our rules – about cell phones in our schools. We are beginning to understand that our students can use the technology without abusing it in schools – if they (and we) understand how important that technology can be.

Part of our responsibility to our students is to teach that understanding without waiting for crises to teach those lessons for us.

A WEB OF COMMUNICATION

Cell phones are just the beginning of this web of communication and access, however. There are several other important devices that will have an impact on the way education works.

Hand-Held Computers

You’ve already seen the Nokia advertisements for their new hand-held computers – with the cell-phone built in for wireless connection to the Internet – in full color and with the standard web screens. Those devices can be used to call home, keep track of homework assignments, look up reference resources from the Internet, maintain a calendar with school events, share files between teachers and students, connect to a television or projector to share PowerPoint presentations, play music files, take messages, send and receive email, and much, much more – without connecting to your school’s network in any way.

That doesn’t mean those devices can’t connect to your network. They certainly can. With the right password, your students and teachers can access the appropriate segments of your school network in order to get and share assignments, papers, and more. And that connection can be wireless, as well.

And it all fits in the palm of your hands.

E-Readers

An “e-reader” is a wired or wireless device into which you can download books – e-books – from the Internet. It has a screen the size of an average hard-backed book and displays text about the size of standard print. It can also display pages that contain full-color pictures, tables, graphs, and other images, just as those would appear in a printed book. To read an e-book, you simply turn the pages by pressing a page-forward or page-back button on the side of the screen.

An e-reader has some other very nice tools for students. The text can be highlighted by dragging a stylus across the lines you want to study later. You can even choose the color of the highlight. You can attach a “sticky-note” to a section of text to remind you why this paragraph or picture is important. You can copy-and-paste to another file and make a note about the citation for the quote so you can use it in your term paper or PowerPoint presentation. You can search for key words or phrases to help you find exactly what you need to study.

An e-reader has some very nice features for schools, too. Textbook companies will soon be providing their books in electronic format. They will license the textbooks to schools by numbers of copies downloaded and used by students. Schools will not have to buy extra textbooks in case enrollment increases. Students will not have to go without textbooks if the school orders fewer than needed. Every textbook can be downloaded, through the school network, into one e-reader for each student (and the weight of that e-reader will not increase as the number of textbooks increases – eliminating backpack-bent backbones as a later-life malady).

Textbook companies will reduce or eliminate their printing costs – which are a significant portion of the total cost of ownership for textbooks for schools. They can also reduce their distribution costs – no packing and trucking costs will be required. Textbook companies can license their electronic textbooks for much less than they can sell the hard copies – and can maintain their profit margins at the same time. And, at the state and school levels, the money saved by not buying textbooks can cover most, if not all of, the costs of e-readers.

Back at the school, the e-readers can access the school network – wired or wireless – so students can have access to several other resources. The online textbooks will include active hyperlinks to online reference and resource materials that will enhance the context in which students are learning content. Teachers can create study materials that students can download from the network. Books in the public domain – like all of Shakespeare’s works and the early American poets – can be downloaded free from the Internet, eliminating the costs of the paperbacks used in English classes. For students with vision problems, the e-reader can enlarge the text or can use voice software to read to the student, aloud or through headphones.

Additional reference and resource materials will be available electronically from public libraries – on-site or online. At home, students can use the e-reader to access online book sellers to purchase and download books for personal reading.

Tablet PCs

Microsoft Corporation recently showed its newest technology – a “tablet PC.” It combines features of hand-held computers, e-readers, laptop computers, and cell phones into one device. It functions like your yellow legal pad in a Cambridge binder – and is about the same size. You place it on your desk, open the binder, and write on the legal pad. Except the legal pad is a screen the same size of your legal pad that translates your writing into text that goes directly into files saved in the tablet PC.

You can take notes in class, including any free-hand drawings, tables, or charts, and have those available for search, sort, and study whenever you prepare for the next exam. (If you miss a class, just email a friend to email you the notes for that day.) You can handwrite your term paper and have it typed at the same time. And, as you handwrite it, you can copy-and-paste to reorganize as you go.

In addition to the new tablet features, the tablet PC will be able to provide e-reader functionality, cell phone capabilities, and the benefits of hand-held computers. It will also provide wireless and wired connectivity.

Classroom Displays

Each of the devices described so far can be connected to computer projectors or to televisions (through scan rate adaptors) for displaying lessons and Internet resources in classrooms.

In the last few months, several companies have demonstrated flat plastic, full-color, high-resolution panels that can be rolled up like chart paper. The first application of those panels will be the replacement of the thicker LED panels used in the screens for cell phones, hand-held computers, e-readers, and laptops – not to mention flat-screen monitors and televisions. These panels will make all of these devices thinner and lighter.

It’s also possible that these flat panels will come in projector-screen sizes for classrooms. Teachers will simply connect their computing device – any of the devices we’ve discussed – to the connector on the edge of that panel (or wirelessly) and will be able to present lessons to a roomful of students – large enough that everyone can see.

The teacher will be able to write and draw electronically on the screen, as well. The entire screen, including the notes and drawings can then be saved for future use. The teacher can then share those screens as study materials with students – through the network. When the lesson is over, the panel can be rolled up and put away or shared with another teacher.

WE’VE MADE IT NEARLY TWENTY CENTURIES

One of my favorite computer cartoons shows a Neanderthal guy who has just knocked all the edges off a large block of stone to make a perfect wheel. He’s even cut a hole in the center of it. He’s very excited about showing it to his neighbors down the glacier; so, he ties a vine around it and drags it to their cave.

Sometimes we just keep using our old technologies even if we have better ways to get things done.

From stone tools to rockets in space, we’ve always advanced to the next level through the best application of the available technologies. Our students find themselves in the middle of the next technological revolution – the information and communication age. As in all other eras, our children will learn from those of us who know enough to teach them. But, it’s not enough to just know enough. Our job is to teach them content within the context of change. We must model the ability to access information, turn it into knowledge, and apply it to the changing world around us – even as we teach them to do the same things.

The technologies of the information and communication age have more potential for furthering democracy than any previous technologies – simply because they can equalize our access to and participation in the processes of that age. We must view technology as a legitimate tool for education. It must be incorporated into everything we plan for the children we serve; otherwise, we remain the biggest barrier to their success.

In education, we spend a lot of money to bring information to our students – in the forms of textbooks and other printed materials. If we choose to use that money in other ways, we can deliver the same content in much more useful and meaningful ways – through available technologies.

And our kids will no longer need those eighty-pound backpacks.

Gary West

November 11, 2002

Cartoon concept by Sam Gross.

This article was published in The Palmetto Administrator, the journal of the South Carolina Association of School Administrators; Winter 2003.