We would like to begin this educational technology proposal titled The Students Are Waiting with a presentation of the overarching ideas and purpose for furnishing this formal request:
http://prezi.com/whajffvvsdc_/the-students-are-waiting/
"Children think differently from the rest of us. They develop hypertext minds. They leap around. It's as though their cognitive structures were parallel, not sequential." - William D. Winn, Director of the Learning Center at the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory
In Don Tapscott's book titled Grown Up Digital, published in 2009, he opened a chapter titled "A Generation Bathed in Bits" with the following story:
"In January 2004, Mark Zuckerberg had a real-life version of a common nightmare. He was facing his first round of exams at Harvard and he hadn't studied or read anything the professor had assigned for a first-year art history course called Rome of Augustus. Zuckerberg hadn't even gone to class during the term. He was too busy creating a cool computer program called Facebook that would help students get to know one another and share information... But he had an idea, straight out of twenty-first century computer science. He created a Web site and put pictures from the course on it, with a little discussion beside each picture. Maybe the other students could help by filling in the blanks. Within 24 hours, Zuckerberg's classmates helped out alright, with notes so cogent that everyone, Zuckerberg included, passed the test with flying colors. An according to Zuckerberg, the professor didn't see it as cheating. Instead he was "really pleased" to see the students collaborate in such a creative fashion." (Tapscott 39)
This story provides a wonderful example of why innovation technology should be a non-negotiable standard in helping our students to cultivate the necessary 21st century skills they are going to need in order to be competitive in the global marketplace. We would also be remiss if we did not point out our professional responsibility to honor the standards set forth in Vermont's Framework of Standards and Learning Opportunities. This is why our proposal requests in earnest that the school board agree to make the investment to supply all students with their own iPad so that they might have better opportunities to learn in a more collaborative and rigorous fashion. The district has already made the commitment to invest in mobile labs in order to foster more interactive and participatory learning environment in the classroom. With an iPad tablet for each student and teacher, one can enter any classroom and be positioned to engage in collaborative learning opportunity without being at the mercy of lab scheduling. And don't think for one second that the students will forget, abuse, or mistreat these delicate devices- when has a student ever forgotten to bring his or her cell phone into the classroom?! This is a monumental battle teachers and adminstrators have been fighting with students- prohibitive and punitive measures to deny students' use of cellular phones. With the students being granted access to iPads for academic purposes, it plays into what they are desperately seeking to do- use mobile digital devices to communicate with others, especially their peers. Why not channel that desire into a collaborative learning tool that stresses the importance of educational technology?
Perhaps some might say the investment is too cost prohibitive. My students read eight literary texts per year. If the price of each text is around ten dollars, then you're looking at eighty dollars a year for four years for a total of three hundred and twenty dollars. However, these students are taking six other classes per year, and so we see very quickly that the cost of five hundred dollars a student for the iPad seems like the district is going to save a ton of money it's spending on print materials for each individual student's classes throughout their high school careers. It would appear that there should be plenty of money left to insure the iPad tablets in the rare instances one is lost or damaged. Then again, perhaps we don't know what we're talking about... have a look at how Oregon's Tillamook School District #9 responded to the financial incentives to the purchase of iPads in lieu of traditional textbooks this past April.
Of course, we do not want to insult the school board by suggesting that it has been lagging behind in terms of implementing new forms innovation technology within the district. The Study Island software has been a wonderful interactive supplement for helping prepare our students prepare for the NECAP in reading, writing and mathematics. Students, teachers, administrators and parents have really been pleased with the utility of Powerschool. In real time, everyone can view the results of student performance, but with our second and third requests, we hope to have the community benefit from having the opportunity to view the learning that takes place in the classroom during real time, too. Google sites and Blackboard Learn provide teachers with the collaborative, participatory and interactive web tools to create learning opportunities for their pupils, and parents can view these experiences as they unfold as well:
Not unlike a parent's opportunity to witness the learning experiences play out from beyond his or her child's classroom, a portable learning device in the iPad enables students to take the classroom learning activity beyond the parameters of the four walls of the classroom. This is an essential point in requesting funding for the iPad tablets. With interactive learning software that is extremely inexpensive (Blackboad Learn accounts are as little as $2.50 per pupil), and the Google sites accounts are free! The new 2010 Vermont Technology Grade Expectations requires students to become more creative, innovative, critical thinkers, in addition to becoming digital collaborators, communicators and problem solvers. Students are expected to becoming more proactive digital global citizens in addition to become more savvy, media-literate consumers. With the portability of the iPad, the student learning environment becomes more elastic, similarly to how parents can keep tabs on their child's grades from anywhere there's an Internet connection. Class time also become more pliable. Blackboard Learn would enable students to access the course material from the palm of their hands. If a student is physically absent from class, he or she might not necessarily be absent from the learning activity- including those that require collaborative and participatory work with peers. Is there a more efficient or effective alternative without a digital platform to bring the course work to the student on those rare occasions when the student cannot bring herself to the classroom?
With all of the advancements our district has made, we are hardly pioneers to be making these specific requests for the iPad, unrestricted access to the Google sites accounts, and the Blackboard Learn software. We are genuinely requesting that our students stay current with the rapidly changing world of educational technology. This proposal also asks our teaching faculty to remain current with educational technology and how it is changing the ways in which content and pedagogy are being transformed and redesigned at an unprecedented clip. However, the students are waiting.
What will the faculty need in terms of professional development to implement the injection of more educational technology? We already have a week's worth of professional development days scattered throughout the course of each academic year, and we also have the collaboration periods set aside for each respective department (It seems to us that if the initiative was taken to redefine the daily schedule in order to have the faculty collaborate, then it would also appear to be the next natural and logical step to have the students collaborate more often within the digital arena). We propose professional development during faculty in-service training sessions that ascribe to the TPCK and SAMR models to ensure a gradual paradigm shift in the ways that teachers re-design their curriculum in harmony with the addition of the iPad tablets, Google sites accounts and Blackboard Learn software.
References:
http://www.blackboard.com/
Curriculum 21: Essential Eduaction for a Changing World. Edited by Heidi Hayes Jacobs. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2010.
http://www.digiteen.org/
http://sites.google.com
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) number of teaching hours per year:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/teacher-pay-around-the-world/
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results for reading, mathematics and science:
http://www.oecd.org/statisticsdata/0,3381,en_2649_35845621_1_119656_1_1_1,00.html
http://prezi.com/
Technology Provides Parents a Window on the Classroom by Linking Home to School:
http://www.edutopia.org/stw-differentiated-instruction-home-school-parent-connection-video
Tapscott, Donald. Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998.
http://www.tpck.org/
Web 2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
Resources:
A Vision of Students Today http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9
http://cognitivemedia.co.uk.s92713.gridserver.com/
Did You Know 4.0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8
http://dontapscott.com/
http://www.editlib.org/
http://www.edutopia.org/
Many Eyes. http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/
http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/teachers/media_literacy/what_is_media_literacy.cfm
http://www.mediaed.org/
http://novemberlearning.com/
http://www.thersa.org/
http://www.weebly.com/
http://www.wordle.net/
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