How To Persuade School Boards To Open the Net

Suppose you are in the following situation:

You publish a blog, you have numerous feeds in Google Reader, you participate in professional wikis, you subscribe to podcasts in iTunes, you follow hundreds of educators in Twitter, and you realize that you have learned more from these tools than you did in your undergraduate, graduate, and post graduate programs combined, and in a shorter period of time. In other words, you are leveraging not only information but time.

You see how your students could benefit too. You, of course, realize that your students need to conduct themselves appropriately and learn strategies to protect themselves from the cyberbullies.

But you teach in a school district that only uses web-based technology for management purposes - gradebooks, student databases, and the like. The district has outsourced their responsibility of filtering to an non-educational company to restrict the flow of information that comes in and goes out of the school network.

HOW DO YOU CONVINCE THE POWERS THAT BE, THAT THEY ARE VIOLATING THE RIGHTS OF THEIR STUDENTS?

I can't believe it has taken me over 5 years to come back to the basics of persuasion. Use their own vocabulary against them. It is a fundamental strategy in persuasion.

For instance, if you went to your school board as asked them if it would be permissible to have an expert guest speaker in an area which directly addresses your standards, you would likely be given permission and encouragement.

How about stating that you believe your students' opportunities are being limited, and you would like to move your students to their individually "least restrictive environment" that would allow them to be with their peers in a more "normal" setting? Would a board member publicly denounce such a proposal? I don't think they would unless they were ready to address lawsuits and be voted out of office.

But, isn't this what is being done systematically around the United States? If I cannot use Skype, because it is blocked by the techocracy, then I am unable to have a true expert from India speak to my class. If my students cannot have access to blogging tools, Twitter, wikis, cell phones, and other tools of the 21st century, I am teaching in a "self-contained" highly restrictive environment, and my students are being denied their rights to a quality education that will prepare them with tools they need to be "contributing members of society."

I'll be working on this even more. Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

Posted via email from rrmurry's posterous

Engage or Enrage

I still don't like the word "engage" as it relates to a student's attraction to a lesson.  I'm not fully sure why it bothers me...I just don't think the word fits.  I think someone was trying to do the old-timey sermon alliteration, and they had two other words that started with the letter 'E' so "engage" became the word to sell something.

Anyway...

Wes Fryer has done a great job (which is quickly becoming an expectation for many of us - so keep it up!) outling Marc Prensky's recent NCCE speech.  It is Prensky's Engage Me or Enrage Me speech from a couple years ago, but we all need to be reminded of things...especially if we were not engaged the first time through. :-)

Highlights from Wes's notes: followed by my personal reflection of the brief comment in bold italics.

Prensky: 

Our kids will either cry or laugh at the education we gave them in 2008 [30 years from now].

Our kids are already doing this.  The cry and get sick before color-the-bubble tests because teachers tell them their life depends on how well the kid does on it.

We can do on today’s cell phone what people did with room-sized computers in the 1960s.

This is incorrect in a couple very important ways.  1) Phones are portable, not confined to the room.  2) There is more information available to us today (on the phone) than was available to the room-sized computer.  These two ideas put together make the cell phone more powerful than the 1960 room-size computer.

Quoting Charles Handy: "Walking backward into the future helps us keep looking at familiar things…”

This might become my favorite educational quote.  We tend to do many things bass-ackward.

We can be a big part of the solution to the digital divide...
Almost every student already has a powerful computer
- we are far along with 1:1, because a great percentage of your students has a powerful computer in their pocket: a cell phone
cell phones are
- powerful computers
- inexpensive
What is missing here is often our imagination.

Here, Here...Amen...I hear you talkin'...
What is also missing is the fundamental belief from adults that students can use cell phones responsibly.
I think the digital divide is bridged with the cell phone.  I think the money schools waste on buying computers only to spend more money to filter content to the point of censorship and constitutional violations should be redirected to getting cell phone providers to offer unlimited access to their data networks during school hours.

I believe in open phone tests
The teachers who give open phone tests can ask harder questions
- high school senior said after a presentation: most of our tests are already open phone tests, you guys just don’t know it….

Or move away from the concept that a test is the only way to assess.  The idea that a student would call a parent for the answer to a simplistic, knowledge-based question (like a state capital) is only valuable as a way to assess the student's network.

Metaphor for today’s education
- kids used to grow up in the dark intellectually, until they went to school
- at school we started opening up the door, showing them the light, helping them learn about the world
- so in the past we were the people who showed kids the light

What happens today?
- kids grow up in the light:they are connected with their cell phones, computers, etc
- when they come to school, we make kids turn off all their connections to the LIGHT and essentially make them work again in the darkness

Not a bad metaphor...perhaps could become a good parable.  The dark-light allusion would be better with more character development - at least more than "we" as a descriptor.  I might have something to work on this month...stay tuned.

“I’m bored all day because the teachers
“it’s not attention deficient, I’m just not listening”

From Office Space - It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.  On my own kid's Facebook page of favorite quotes.  The not listening aspect of school is as old as education itself.  My concern about the use of technology taught by schools, is that teachers will make the wonderful world of tech as boring as they have history, science, reading, math, and language arts. 

The new paradigm is kids teaching themselves, not all on their own but with the teacher’s guidance
- you don’t even need technology for that, but technology helps.
Technology isn’t the answer
- we are going to have to change how we are teaching before we introduce the technology.

The Everlasting Dream...that kids would just teach themselves.  The teacher will always have to provide more than guidance.  Constructivism works...but only when the student has basic skills, available resources, and motivation.  The teacher might need to study to characteristics of great public speakers.  Revival (religious or otherwise) always occurs on the heals of great oratory.  That is why people are currently enamored with Barak Obama.  Teachers could learn a lot from using YouTube to critically evaluate the great speeches throughout the 20th century. 

I am currently working on how educators/counselors have taken the burden away from themselves by creating a new vocabulary.  Really, we have taken the words motivation and manipulation and talk of intrinsic motivation vs. extrinsic motivation (and tried to get rid of the negative, but effective use of manipulation).  We've done the same with the word discipline (which is from always from within - self-discipline is redundant) and punishment...stay tuned for this one too.

Fryer:
SEEING THIS AGAIN MAKES ME RETHINK MY CURRENT PROFESSIONAL CAREER TRACK. I SEE MOVIES LIKE THIS, AND I WANT TO GO BACK INTO THE CLASSROOM AND FOCUS ON HELPING STUDENTS DO THIS. NOT TALKING ABOUT IT. DOING IT. NOT ENCOURAGING OTHERS TO DO IT. DOING IT. NOT SAYING “WOULDN’T IT BE GREAT IF WE….” DOING IT.

Welcome to my party Wes.  I have spent the last two years out of the classroom.  Prior to that I taught students how to use technology, because that is where we truly were in 2001.  It's time to get back to the Social Studies classroom and go back to the work of teaching.

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