Let’s Stop Revolutionizing – and get on with teaching

I’ve been teaching for sixteen years. I’ve heard over and over how one technology or another will save education.

I’m still waiting.

Let me first say, I’m not one to distance myself from new technology. I don’t hold it at arms length, I embrace it. I love technology. It’s fair to say, I’m a nerd.

I had a smart board a decade before our county embraced them. It was awesome. Sure, the markers were too big to hold. The adapter would often fall off the board, and I still  had to stand at the front of the room, but I loved it.

 

 

I bought a touch screen convertible laptop back in 2005. The stylus worked great, when it worked. It was a little slow. It would bog down a little when I used massive programs like Notepad. The screen was finicky and often the entire system crashed, but I loved it. It was rumored I could even share the screen wirelessly, but that never panned out.

 

I could go on and on with new technologies I’ve tried, but they all pan out the same for me. I use them, some I keep, others slowly fall away if they don’t help much. But for  each one, the change is iterative. Not one has “revolutionized” the way I teach. The bad ones waste time for me or my students. The good ones help me do my job better, or help my students learn more quickly or with more depth. None of them though have lived up to the buzz that surrounds them.

We, as educators, move from one technology to another and get caught up in the shininess and potential, a potential that is often visualized by those who are selling it.  Then we embrace the potential and dive in. Administrations spend money on the new thing. The good administrations invest in training, and then ask or compel teachers to get on board with the new tech. Then we all wait for the new tech to change everything, and it never does.

As Derek Muller points out, we’ve been doing the same thing since the blackboard, and we’ve yet to see the revolution.

It seems that the information age has brought even more claims of the technology elixir that will cure all our woes. I understand the excitement. New technology can help us change what we do. It can make our jobs easier, help us connect to students outside the classroom, appeal to multiple modalities of learning, give students control over pacing and direction of learning. All of these things are good, but none of them are revolutionary. We’ve always been able to do them, it’s just that technology provides so many new tools to do it. We have new tools every day rather than every year, or decade.

But that’s just it, isn’t it. Technology provides us with new tools to do the same job. We can use them to improve education for our students, but the change is iterative, not revolutionary.  The electric drill didn’t revolutionize building, it just helped improve the time it took to build things.

Anointing technology as the savior of education is fraught with problems. Not the least of which is teachers are weary of the grandiose claims that never pan out. Teachers also don’t have to feel like it’s an all in proposition. Let them try new technology like the try new tools. Let them see the little ways it can improve their lessons or their students learning. Those changes will give teachers the confidence to try the next tool, and we will all slowly and with deliberate purpose change the face of education.

Minecraft – Lord of the Flies – IT Dept

One of the many things I’m trying to change is to slow down and let the kids absorb a lesson. With such a huge focus on standards and curriculum, it’s easy for me to get lost in getting everything done. 

I’ve tried many things over the years to introduce Lord of the Flies to them. Giving them time alone, thought experiments, prewrites about war. It’s usually mildly successful, but meh…take it or leave it. I just haven’t taken the time to do it right. This year, I used Minecraft to introduce the novel.

If you’re not sure what Minecraft is, or how it could work in your classroom, watch this intro to MinecraftEDU.

This year, I created a map of the island in WorldPainter, a program that lets you build custom Minecraft maps. Then I let the kids explore the island for two days. 

Here’s a quick tour of the island and the actual world I made.

They had to journal about each day’s experience as if they were actually trying to survive. Quick time out to say, EVERYONE did their journals! The only instructions were to pretend like it was a real survival situation and really try to survive.

The first day, they all gathered resources and worked on building houses. They teamed up. Kids that knew Minecraft helped the others. On day two, a few of the kids started attacking each other and burning down houses, just as I had expected.

I struggled with whether to let them attack one another, but the level of violence is minimal, and it isn’t graphic. I eventually decided to allow them to play against each other. On the second day, they did just that. A few of the kids ran around attacking each other, and burning houses. That led to a great discussion about human nature and the real world parallels. 

We’ll revisit the island throughout the book to reenact scenes, or try to fine tune the map to more closely fit. I’m hoping these exercises help them read closely and visualize the island better.

I see a lot of other opportunities for my tenth graders.

• Create the ranch in Of Mice and Men paying a lot of attention to each location. Curly and his wife’s room, the bunk house, the barn, the dream ranch.
• Macbeth’s castle – There are a TON of castle maps.
• Download a map of the Globe theater and have the kids screencast (Jing – Free) scenes from the play.

Finally, a quick note about working with your IT department. It’s easy to feel like the central office doesn’t care about trying new things. Sometimes that’s true. Bureaucracies are inherently change averse. Usually though, that’s only because either they don’t know why the thing you want is beneficial or because they are overloaded like we are.  

My advice, get a name. After going around and around, I reached out to one of the Techs who had his phone number in his email signature. Once I got to talk to Dennis and explained what I wanted to do and why, he worked day and night to help me get the project up and running. 

---

Update: Here’s a quick video of the kids actually interacting on the island. I use this to talk about how quickly they went from cooperation to competition and destruction.