To say I was a little nervous was an understatement. Here we were, the rich white people, sweeping in to tell the poor black people how it should be done. How were we going to connect with these teachers? How would we build a rapport? How would we get them to understand that we were there to work WITH them, not FOR them? We didn’t have all of the answers, but we wanted to help them come up with their own solutions.

Zac volunteered to lead the first session. It was a tough crowd. They were quiet. They were skeptical. But within two minutes, he had won their hearts. He had them laughing and thinking. He connected with them. He broke the ice. And I knew then that everything was going to be fine.

I also knew that I had to find a way to get him here to talk to our teachers. Zac is not a technology guy who happens to also be a teacher. He’s a dynamic teacher who uses technology when it’s appropriate and effective. Last week he spoke to our teachers at a technology-focused inservice event. One of our teachers, Cindy Hubert, was kind enough to video Zac’s presentation with her flip camera. And while there are some occasional problems with the video, in general she did a great job.

Zac Chase BBHCSD Keynote Presentation 3/5/10 from Debbie Schinker on Vimeo.

The staff’s reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Here’s what they had to say in the evaluation surveys:

• Zac chase was the best in-service speaker that I can remember.
• He was a great speaker and well worth the time!
• He was a great speaker; he was motivating in addition to being an awesome start to the day!
• Zac did a great job holding the audience’s attention and making us think and laugh at the way we do things. My goal is to work harder at getting my kids more in tune with technology after hearing him address school issues and demonstrate its effect on kids through the videos.
• Excellent speaker and a great lead into the morning inservices…
• I wanted more!
• He was very inspiring and entertaining, but he did leave me a bit overwhelmed..
• Zac is extremely knowledgeable and inspirational. We must keep in the forefront his message of being lifelong learners and always striving to better use technology to prepare our students for the future.
• Zac Chase was brilliant! Teachers have to understand the power and advantages of technology. Zac did an outstanding job of conveying a very important message to educators.
• We need more days with presentators like Zac Chase!
• I would like to strongly encourage you to bring Zac Chase back to our district for other speaking events. He was incredibly inspiring and helpful to me as a professional. I look forward to following him on twitter, facebook, and his blog page.
• I thought he was one of the best presenters we have had in years!!!!!
• Zac Chase was excellent! I would have loved to have heard more. His talk contained the kind of forward thinking content necessary to get teachers thinking about how our learners have changed and will continue to change. His presentation inspired me to re-think how I am teaching a number of my units.
• Mr. Chase was the best keynote speaker that we have had. He was engaging, had a sense of humor and was a great start to our day. He made you think in his own way how far we have come with technology and how we can use it with our students to prepare them for their new world, which is much different than the one I grew up with. I was sorry that I had not signed up for his breakout session.
• This was the best waiver day! I enjoyed everything. The speaker was outstanding and inspirational.
• He knew how to suggest without accusing, and did not speak down to his audience.
• Zac was an outstanding keynote presenter.
• Zac’s message was relevant and timely. We ALL need to meet our students’ needs for understanding and negotiating their rapidly changing environment and can make a much stronger impact by doing so. Our educators need PLANNED TIME to develop these competencies.
• Great job. I found the presenter to be very informational, while also entertaining.
• I felt this presenter was by far the best part of the day. He was inspirational and got me excited about teaching and learning. I wish I had been able to spend more of my day listening and learning and interacting with him.
• I could have listened to Zac longer than the hour in the keynote timeframe.
• In all of my years of teaching, I have never heard a group of teachers so quiet and attentative for a speaker. So many times we are as a group not respectful in listening. Great message and he made you think.
• Well Done
• I loved the morning session. It was by far the best inservice day we’ve ever had. I learned so much about how to integrate more technology into the classroom. I wish it could have been a whole day activity. I would have loved to have sat in on more sessions. Please do more days like this. It was nice hearing teachers tell what works, not some outside person lecturing us on what we should do! There are some really great technology ideas out there that our teachers our using!!!!!!
• The speaker was great and the individual presentations were really effective.
• He was an engaging speaker.
• Outstanding! I was so glad to actually see a presentation that will help me and inspire me in my teaching. It was fun, informative, and meaningful. Thank you so much for giving us something to think about and incorporate into our own teaching. Also, your shoes were awesome.
• Loved that my peers taught us subjects and it wasn’t a professor with a powerpoint and graphs. Zac was great! Thank you for the technology resources!
• This was the first large group speaker that I wasn’t ready to leave the room after an hour of time. I enjoyed his presentation and felt that he was very motivating. I think this day could have been better if we would have had time to incorporate some of these technology ideas. Whether it be in the breakout sessions, or in the afternoon, time spent with the ideas would have been valuable.
• I really enjoyed Zac’s speech and perspective on the world. I was surprised at how engaged I was and was disappointed that I did not sign up for his break-out session.
• I think Zac was GREAT! I loved his message and he was incredibly motivating! Can we convince him to come teach in Brecksville?
• This was the best inservice I can remember. The speaker was excellent - good points made - loved the clicking textboo!
• He was great and a well needed change of pace!
• I really enjoyed the early morning presentation. It was entertaining and thought provoking.
• Outstanding presenter! The best we’ve had in my career here at BBHCSD!
• Awesome!
• Wonderful and thought provoking!!
• Excellent! Very thought provoking and ‘fun’.
• I would have loved to hear him speak longer. I did not attend his breakout sessions since I did not who he was prior and had too many other options that I wanted to take.
• Zac is an amazing teacher. After 29 years as a teacher, I found myself feeling totally inadequate at the end of his presentation, because there are so many elements of technology that I don’t even know about.
• Good presenter. Inspiring. Better than a tutorial or presentation about this is what you have to do/should do/ought to accomplish.
• The morning was fantastic
• This was one of the best waiver days we have had in this district. I loved the keynote speaker and feel that what I learned I will use in my classroom. Thank you!!
• Excellent!! He is an incredible speaker. I wish he was my son’s teacher.

The topics discussed run the gamut from overcoming the challenges of time to finding useful resources for classroom projects to figuring out how to effectively use these technology resources in actual class projects. Zac briefly addresses his school’s approach to ethical issues around filtering, cheating, and personal responsibility. He gives his take on various approaches to curriculum and assessment mapping. He also recommends several books on working with today’s teens.

The video of Zac’s presentation is below. A list of links to the resources he mentions is available on Delicious.

Teaching in Our Teens from John Schinker on Vimeo.

Zac Chase blogs at autodizactic.com. You can follow him on twitter at mrchase.

Photo credit: chernobylBob on flickr

What can these phones do? They can certainly make phone calls and send and receive text messages. They all have digital cameras. Most of them can record audio and video. A few students have smartphones that can access the web, run applications, and do other amazing things. While they’re not a replacement for a computer, they are capable of doing a lot of useful things. Creating a student response system with them to get immediate feedback would be pretty easy to do. Having students using them for digital storytelling would be possible. And the processing power in even the most basic phone is many times more powerful than even the most advanced scientific (and, perhaps, graphing) calculators that we used when I was in school. In a school / political environment / economic situation where we’re not going to be able to provide laptops for every student in the near future, we should be taking every possible advantage of the technology they already have.

But cell phones have problems. When students send inappropriate pictures of themselves to one another, it’s a cause for concern. When they do it at school, it could be a potential liability. Having the ability to text and access the Internet has to change how we do assessment. And, unlike the school Internet connections, cell phones don’t have filtered Internet access. While the school is only legally required to filter Internet access on devices provided by the school, in practice few administrators and teachers would be happy with a solution that makes it trivial for students to access any online content at any time from school.

Likewise, we have the same problems with social networking tools. We know that it can be valuable for students to build relationships, connections, personal learning networks. We also know that social networks are primarily just that — social. In addition to being a useful communication tool, it can be an excellent time waster. And many school officials point out that they open up new avenues for cyberbullying, further distracting teachers and school leaders with discipline and student management issues that can be avoided by blocking access to such services.

It is possible to set up walled-garden versions of social networks. Both Buddypress and Elgg give students the opportunity to participate in a closed system, where only other people affiliated with the school can participate. This can help, because trying such systems to network accounts ensures accountability, and allows the school to make the students accountable for the choices they make when using such tools. But, again, it’s a path few schools are chosing to follow.

Even cloud computing resources, like web-based email and Google Apps accounts, can raise concerns. Giving students email accounts increases the liklihood that they’ll be accidentally exposed to inappropriate content. Once they start getting on spam lists, it’s almost certain that they’ll receive unsolicited messages, even with the best anti-spam software. Plus, both email and Google Docs give students a way to get inappropriate content into the school. A picture, video, or application could be emailed or uploaded to the Google account, and then accessed from school. I don’t know of any foolproof filtering solutions that would solve this problem.

The sessions at eTech that dealt with these technologies were much more optimistic. It was nice to hear about several schools that have successfully implemented these types of technologies. Mostly, success seems to depend on pre-planning, setting expectations, and enforcing the rules. Rather than relying on the technology to tell the students what they can or cannot do, they have to take a certain sense of responsibility. And there have to be consequences for making poor choices.

Overall, I’m optimistic that these technologies can have a place in the classroom. It’s just a matter of identifying how and where they’ll be most beneficial, and designing an implementation strategy to fit those needs.

K-12 schools are also under extraordinary pressure to prove that they’re effective. We use standardized assessments that are designed to measure how well the students have learned the academic content standards at each grade level. With more and more pressure to make sure that every learner passes every test, the reality of school is that we’re totally focused on whatever it takes to get the students to pass the tests.

Since we don’t measure things like innovative thinking and creativity and collaboration and information literacy, where do those things end up on the priority list? While the technology standards may call for teaching email in third grade, the fact that there’s no test means it doesn’t get taught.

Photo credit: Huskyboy on Flickr

But at the technology conference, we get reminded of all of the things we should be doing. We hear about the erosion of the American standard of living. We hear about outsourcing and the transition from industrial to service to information to innovation economies. We see all of the things that are technologically possible, and we know that we’re not really doing the right thing.

So we have this tension between what we have to do and what we need to do. The frustrating thing is that we’re hearing the same things year after year, but it seems like we’re not making a lot of progress. Part of this came up in Tuesday’s panel discussion. The panel was supposed to be discussing how we can engage and empower under-served communities. As the discussion meandered all over the place, they had to repeatedly refocus on things the people in the audience can do to try to help the under-served. Sure, there were suggestions for the Obama administration, and things that the legislature can do, and big-picture ideas about how the educational system should work. But there weren’t a lot of things that the people in the audience — teachers, local school district officials, and tech support people — can take away and implement.

So we know where we are. We know where we need to be. But we don’t know how to get there. So we hope for incremental improvement. We work with individual teachers and individual classes and try to squeeze some of the elements of the new world into the old model. But at the same time, we realize that if we continue on the current course, the change we need isn’t going to happen in time.

They start off the list this way:

Establish technology in education as the backbone of school improvement. To truly improve our schools for the long term and ensure that all students are equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to achieve in the 21st century, education technology must permeate every corner of the learning process.

The list goes on from there, and promotes the use of technology at the center of career readiness, professional development, pre-service teacher education, and assessment. They do, eventually, get to research and digitial citizenship. But the theme of the list is very clear: technology is the center of education. If we focus on the technology, everything else ties in to it and we can solve our education problems.

Granted, it’s ISTE’s mission to promote the use of technology in education. But it’s a mistake to make technology the focus of education. We’ve been talking for a while about getting away from the tools, and speding more time focusing on what we’re actually doing with the technology — how it changes the things students and teachers are doing, and how it affects the way they learn. But even the “technology integration” perspective is frequently misguided. Too often, it’s “hey, here’s this really cool gadget. I’m sure it has a lot of possible uses in education. We have to find some.” I myself have been guilty of that. Just yesterday, I said in my presentation that we have to find some relevant, useful, authentic ways to use these cell phones effectively in education. That, too, misses the point.

Educon Wordle by Christopherl

Compare all of this to Educon. This conference had nearly all of the heavy hitters in educational technology. I briefly talked to David Warlick yesterday about his experience there. He admitted it was a little intimidating. When you look over your audience and see half of your blogroll sitting there, it can be a little unnerving. But despite the overwhelming support of Educon by the edtech leaders, they’re very clear that this isn’t a technology conference.

And it is not a technology conference. It is an education conference. It is, hopefully, an innovation conference where we can come together, both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas — from the very practical to the big dreams.

David reflected that technology didn’t even come up most of the time. In his conversation, when they were plotting activities on his Daggett/Bloom grid, he asked them how they could adapt the activities to put them higher on the Bloom’s scale. They came up with more probing questions, better activities, and modified procedures. But instead of saying, for example, “the kids could blog about it,” they were more apt to say that “the kids could reflect about it in their journals.” It doesn’t matter if the journal is on a blog or on paper. The focus is on the teaching and learning.

At eTech, there seems to be a strong sense that we have all of this technology — we have these great resources. We have these wonderful tools. We have to find an innovative use for them in the classroom. Maybe we’re looking at it from the wrong side. If we spent more time focusing on the “what and how” of learning, we can plug the technology in where it’s most appropriate, and most productive. I wonder what would happen if this conference (and the ISTE conference) were more like Educon.

Photo credit: Alvin Trusty

A few weeks ago, a colleague asked me if I still think about Africa a lot. “Every day,” I replied. “Every day for the past year — six months before I went, and six months after coming home.” The experience certainly had a profound effect on me. While you wouldn’t necessarily see it in my day-to-day work, there’s been an attitude shift. Maybe it’s a change in perspective. Maybe it’s a broadening of horizons. Maybe it’s just an acknowledgment that the whole world isn’t like Northeast Ohio. The whole world isn’t like the United States. The whole world isn’t like North America.

That’s a valuable lesson. It’s not necessarily something that could be measured on a test somewhere. It may not even be something that I can articulate very well. But today, I hope to try. My presentation for the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference focuses on lessons learned during my Education Beyond Borders experience.

Here’s the video from my presentation:

Here are the other resources from my session:

• Education Beyond Borders has a website/ning, a Youtube channel, a Twitter feed, and a Facebook group.
• The resources used in my presentation are all on delicious. They’re tagged with “oetc10″ and they include the sources for the population and cell phone proliferation statistics. There are also some resources tagged there that ended up being cut from the final presentation.
• Most of my photos from the experience are on Flickr.

Photo credit: Billie Hara on Flickr

Before that point, if the technology didn’t work, there was always a plan B. Teachers didn’t check email every day. We didn’t have computers in all of our classrooms. Students were almost never required to use computers, except in computer-specific classes.

It wasn’t long before I felt comfortable enough with the new server. It helped that it would break occasionally. Without any remaining consultant time and no budget, I learned to fix things. Eventually, we added another server. And then another. And then one for each building. And then backup servers and email servers and archive servers. Then, administrators started buying applications that required their own servers: online gradebooks, professional development packages, food service point of sale systems. Before I knew it, I had 30 servers.

And the mission-critical nature of most of them had become evident. If something was the matter, I’d hear about it quickly. And keeping everything running was proving harder and harder, especially with limited budgets and even more limited staff.

So, two years ago, I started looking at virtualization. If we could take one piece of hardware and run multiple virtual servers on it, that would be easier to manage. We’d have fewer physical devices. We’d save money. We’d save energy. The grass would be greener. The air would be cleaner. We’d all be smarter and happier.

At the same time, we were having a problem with disk storage. Not only were we out of space on many of the servers that held staff and student data, but we were also out of backup space.

So, last year, I added a new 30 TB storage array and virtual server to my infrastructure. It was wonderful. I made a pile of all of the old servers that we could now “retire.” Everything was in the array. Life was good.

It was Mark Twain (probably) who wrote, “Put all your eggs in the one basket and — WATCH THAT BASKET.” Lately, we’ve been having trouble with the basket. Specifically, one of the hard drive controllers on the storage array has been a bit flaky. After countless hours of troubleshooting, support calls, and annoying reliability problems for my users, it appears to be working now. But I don’t have the confidence in it that I did a couple months ago.

Perhaps the worst part is that we now depend on it so much. It’s used by the early-riser teachers who are in at 6:00 AM. It’s used by the elementary school teachers who are still at school at 4:00 PM. It’s used by teachers and students working from home, sometimes until midnight or later. If I need to reboot it or pull a controller out to troubleshoot, it has to be done between about 2:00 AM and 6:00 AM. Since I get neither comp time nor overtime, that gets old quickly.

So, I’m pulling those old servers back off the shelf. After some hard drive upgrades, they’ll all become virtual servers, so I can move resources around more easily when something’s not working. But to really get the redundancy we should have, I’d need to invest a lot more money than we have in the budget, and a lot more time than I have.

We can have a lot of technology. We can have reliable technology. We can have inexpensive technology. But we can’t have all of those at the same time.

It’s going to be a bad year for Microsoft.
And it would have been, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids. Hot on the heels of the Mojave experiment, where Microsoft “researchers” determined that people actually liked Folgers crystals if they were repackaged and rebranded, the buzz about Windows 7 was that it was a warmed-over Vista with only superficial improvements. We were all set for the end of Microsoft dominance. But, as it turned, out, Windows 7 is actually better than Vista. Some would say it’s even better than XP. While we’re not ready to upgrade all of our XP machines to Windows 7 just yet, we’re also not frantically searching for an alternative to Microsoft operating systems any more.

Linux missed the boat again. This was a rare opportunity for them to get a foothold in the consumer OS market. But the product still isn’t good enough. I’ve said this before, but Linux is just too much of a pain to use as a primary desktop operating system. Most people in the mainstream have neither the time, the patience, nor the expertise to use Linux. So unless you’re going to use Apple, the obvious choice is still Microsoft.

On the positive side, we did see Firefox 3.5 overtake Internet Explorer 7 as the world’s most popular browser. That’s a victory if you ignore the fact that the third browser is IE 8, and the fourth is IE 6. That’s right, the version before the version before the current version of Internet Explorer is more popular than Chrome, Safari, and Opera put together. That’s a lot of people with out-of-date Windows systems.

The blogging fad is over.
I didn’t say that blogging was dead. It’s just, umm, sleeping. My personal blogging output continued to slide this year. In 2008, I posted 47% less content than in 2007. In 2009, I reduced that by another 51%. In 2006 and 2007, I was averaging two posts a week. Now, I’m happy if I get one post a month done.

It’s not just me. Almost everyone in my feed reader has really scaled back as well. The big news, though, is not that I’m not writing. It’s that I’m not reading. I used to spend about an hour a day getting caught up with the blogosphere. Now, I barely spend any time at all on it. I’m reading less. I’m commenting less. I’m posting less. I’m learning less.

I don’t think that blogging is ending. I just think that it’s matured. We’re closer to a manageable level now. It’s not overwhelming anymore. I can (and plan to) reshuffle the feeds a bit to get some new voices, but the blog is no longer the centerpiece of the learning network. We have other tools, too, and they all work together.

We’re going to have to do more with less.
The economy was bad in 2009. There’s no denying that. Schools tend to lag a bit behind the economic curve, so bad times hit us a little later, and recovery takes longer. In our school district, we went through a substantial budget reduction last spring, and round two is coming just around the corner. We’re seeing cuts in teaching staff, support staff, supplies, department budgets, and, yes, technology.

The hard part is not so much the reduction in funding for hardware and software — we can weather that storm. The hard part is “doing more with less.” The support demands are still increasing at a ridiculous pace. We now have projectors and Smart Boards in most of our classrooms. We’re using software extensively for intervention. We’re venturing into Google Apps, and wireless networks, and ebooks. All of this stuff is mission-critical now. It has to work all the time. But adding support staff is out of the question. The struggle is to avoid reductions in technology support staff. At the same time, we’re being asked to add new technologies to overcome staffing shortages in other areas. So we’re building online systems to handle facility scheduling. We’re automating a lot of processes that used to be done by people. And we’re doing it with fewer resources.

We will get through this. We will recover. But we can’t sustain this level of support forever.

Professional development finally goes online.
I wish. It’s true that we’re doing more online professional development than ever before, but that’s not saying much. Unfortunately, we’ve looked to online tools to provide compliance training, which is largely a farce. We have to provide “child abuse prevention” training to all staff. So we contract with a company that provides this “training” online. Generally, this involves people going online, looking at a series of screens with static content, and affirming that they’ve “received” this content. It’s all about the school being able to prove that the material has been “covered.” It has nothing to do with anybody actually learning anything.

The lawyers want us to be able to prove that every staff member has received a copy of the staff handbook. So the teachers log into the online system. They get shown a 40 page document, and are told to answer the one-question quiz which consists of them agreeing that they have received, read, and understood the document given to them. There’s one right answer.

This kind of training does nothing to improve teaching and learning. But worse than that, it gives online learning a bad name. We’re teaching our teachers that online tools are the equivalent of the boring lecture, where the only assessment tool measures attendance.

I’m still hopeful that we can reverse that, and there are finally a few people interested in using Moodle for professional development in my school district. But it’s an even bigger uphill battle than it was before.

Learning will become less formal.
I argued a year ago that we can learn as much — or more — from unstructured environments as we can from tightly organized, structured classes. The development of learning networks allows us to participate in uniquely beneficial learning environments and activities. And while this works well for professional development, it’s not particularly well suited to the accountability of “covering” a set list of objectives. From a pure “learning is more relevant when done informally” perspective, I still believe that this is the best way for us to learn. But as long as the accountability measures are tied to specific questions measuring specific knowledge, it’s an inefficient way to teach kids.

My hope is that we’re providing more opportunities for our students to participate in informal learning opportunities as we address collaboration, globalization, innovative thinking, and information literacy. But in the real world, we’re not measuring those things. And it’s getting harder to meet the government’s targets for adequate yearly progress. So our attention is mostly focused elsewhere.

So what’s the score? I made five predictions. I think I manged to get two of them right. The others were things that might have happened, or that could have happened, or that should have happened. But they didn’t. Or, at least, they didn’t come true yet. That should be enough to keep me away from predicting the future, and you’re not going to see another blog post tomorrow about what’s coming in 2010. Maybe it’s better to stick to emerging trends and new ideas, without tying them to specific timelines.

Happy 2010. Let’s hope it’s a good one.

Yet we see a lot of technology being used in education to automate much simpler processes. Take the interactive whiteboard, for example. Over the last three years, we’ve installed more than 200 SMART Boards in classrooms in this school district. They’re now in about 75% of our classrooms. The boards have the potential to transform the way teaching and learning happens in the classroom. They can help make learning a truly interactive experience. They can help engage learners. They can make things much easier for the teacher. But in many classrooms, we’re using them the same way we’ve been using overhead projectors in the classroom for a generation. The teacher writes notes on the SMART Board instead of the chalkboard or overhead transparency. Maybe she saves the file and shares it with students who were absent or want an additional study aide. Sometimes, she’ll scan a workbook page, put it on the SMART Board, and then complete it as a class. Sure, the interactive whiteboards have the potential to change teaching and learning, but for the most part, we don’t use them like that.

I regularly hear from software vendors who want to sell us the latest, greatest technology in reading and math instruction. For only $30/$100/$1000 per student, we can get software that will teach them letter sounds, or will help them practice their math facts. Take Scholastic’s Fastt Math, for example. A site license costs $9,000, and will cover an entire school. The software helps students practice their addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts. It keeps drilling them until they achieve fluency (defined as the ability to answer in 0.8 seconds or less). We used to do that with flash cards and timed tests. We could buy 3,000 sets of flash cards, or print 300,000 timed tests for the same price as Fastt Math. And, we wouldn’t have to buy any computers.

Last night, Dave and I talked about student responses systems on EdTechWeekly.  Basically, the idea is this: each student has a device the size of a remote control. At key points in the lesson, the teacher asks a question. The students respond by pressing one of the buttons on their remotes. The teacher immediately gets feedback, and knows whether to go back and review, pick up the pace, or continue the lesson as they have been. It allows the teacher to regularly get feedback from the class on how the lesson is going.

This may sound like a wonderful, innovative use of technology. But the teachers in the chat room weren’t impressed:

[19:40] <jackiegerstein> They can raise their hands to do the same thing
[19:40] <mrsdurff> those are meant for whole class instruction - industrial age classrooms
[19:40] <jackiegerstein> Loses its novelty fast too
[19:41] <cyndidannerkuhn> I have a set of 32 Quizdoms I won at Necc a couple years ago, they just sit in my office!!  Just don’t need them, they would not enhance what I teach.
[19:41] <jackiegerstein> yes durff - my point -thx for the clarification
[19:41] <mrsdurff> just not worth the $
[19:42] <mrsdurff> why use whole class instruction anyway?
[19:42] <jackiegerstein> agreement

It’s another gadget being sold to the schools as a necessary component of the “21st Century Classroom.”  And so it continues. We need netbooks. We need e-book readers. We have to have wireless networks. We have to find a way to use cell phones productively in the classroom. Every teacher should have a laptop. We need more technology, more infrastructure, more support, and more professional development.

But what we really need is more innovation.

Take Russell Stannard, for example. He uses screen-recording software when grading student work. He records a little video as he goes through the student essays. He can use his mouse to highlight sections and just talk about them. He can give general feedback orally. There’s no need for him to write out comments on a paper document and return it to the student. For the learner, this type of personal feedback is much more valuable than a few notes scribbled in the margin. For the teacher, it doesn’t take any more time than grading the traditional way.

What would it cost to do this? The software is free. All you would need is a headset ($12 for a reasonably good one, $8 for a cheap one). You’d also need a way for students to submit their work electronically (also free).  But take this a step further. If you’re grading this way, it doesn’t necessarily have to be an essay you’re evaluating. It might be a movie, or a slideshow, or an animation. Maybe you’re not the only one evaluating it. These tools could also be used by students as part of a peer review process. Now we’re starting to get closer to the area where these things are really hard to do without technology.

Take a look at Mr. Noon’s blog, Tell the Raven. This is a student writing project for sixth graders in Fairbanks, Alaska. Almost all of the content is written and posted by students. A student-run blog is not exciting or flashy or new anymore. They’re a dime a dozen (less than that, actually, since the software is free). But this teacher is encouraging his students to write, edit, revise, and post their stories. Yes, they have a global audience. Yes, anyone, anywhere might read what they’re writing. Occasionally, someone might comment on a post. But the point, I think, is not so much that people will read their work online as much as the fact that people can read their work online. They want their very best writing to be out there. They’re working hard to hone their storytelling skills.  They’re improving their writing because they have the potential of an authentic audience.

Sometimes the innovative things aren’t the expensive novelties that we see in the exhibit areas of technology conferences. We need to spend more time focusing on the changes that will make a difference and a little less time buying stuff.

What are some other examples of teachers using technology in innovative ways?

Photo credit: listener42 on flickr

What I quickly found out was that this car was a hybrid. The Toyota Prius had just undergone a redesign for the 2004 model year, and it was starting to gain some attention. Because oil was still around $30 a barrel, the US market wasn’t paying attention to fuel economy yet. I had a hard time finding sales people who knew anything about the Prius, and an even harder time finding one to test drive. When I finally did find a dealer who would let me drive one, I slipped behind the wheel and noticed an LCD screen in the middle of the dashboard. I had never seen this before. The screen displayed the car’s current gas mileage, and was updated every few seconds.

So, when I hit the gas to accelerate, the mileage went down to near zero. When I let up on the accelerator to coast down a hill, the mileage shot up to near 100 MPG. I quickly learned that if I accelerate more slowly, I get better mileage. If I ease off the gas and slowly coast to a stoplight, I get better mileage than I do if I hit the brakes at the last minute. This data, provided in real time, on the dash board, trains the driver to conserve energy.

I’m not saying that the Prius doesn’t have innovative technology that goes a long way toward improving fuel economy. It most certainly does. But a big part of their gains in the real world are realized by teaching the driver to be more efficient.

In South Africa, electricity works on a pre-pay model. When you need electricity, you go down to the local fish market and buy some. You give them $45, and they give you 50 kilowatt-hours of electricity in the form of a card with a code on it. You take the card home, and punch the code into your electric meter (which is conveniently located inside the house). The LCD screen increases the number of credits you have, and you’re all set. As you use electricity, the credits get deducted. You can always look at the meter to see how much electricity you have left. When the number reaches zero, the power goes out.

This model makes energy use tangible for the consumer. Turn on the dishwasher, or clothes dryer, or space heater, and the numbers go down faster. People living in this environment know how much energy is used by various tasks. They’re more likely to turn off appliances and lights when they’re not being used. They use less hot water. They keep the room temperature a degree or two colder than they otherwise might. The meter makes people conservationists.

There’s even some research to support this. In 2006, the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford completed a literature review on this.

“Overall, the literature demonstrates that clear feedback is a necessary element in learning how to control fuel use more effectively over a long period of time and that instantaneous direct feedback in combination with frequent, accurate billing (a form of indirect feedback) is needed as a basis for sustained demand reduction. Thus feedback is useful on its own, as a self-teaching tool. It is also clear that it improves the effectiveness of other information and advice in achieving better understanding and control of energy use.”

So how do you get information about your energy use? You go to Google, of course, the keeper of all knowledge. Last week, they announced a partnership with a company called Energy, Inc. Consumers purchase and install a TED 5000 electricity monitoring device for about $200. The devices monitors electricity usage in the home. It communicates with Google’s free Power Meter software, and consumers can view current and historical energy usage in their homes. It also compares your energy use with others, and with your own historical data. Power Meter integrates with iGoogle, so this data can be displayed as a widget on your web portal.

On this blog action day, many bloggers around the world are focusing on climate change issues. One of the biggest components of climate change is energy use. We’ve been using far more than our fair share for a long time now, and reversing that trend starts in the home.