Teaching with technology: The communications revolution reaches students where they live  

Don’t confiscate your students’ iPods just yet. They could be used to increase the children’s reading fluency.

And that policy banning cell phones in the classroom might need to be reconsidered. Smart phones with Internet connectivity can be used for Internet searches in the classroom and are a lot cheaper than laptops.

In an era when technology seems to be changing almost daily, school boards and administrators need to revisit their technology policies almost as rapidly, education experts advise. Internet chat rooms, online video games and other electronic features that once seemed inappropriate for the classroom are proving useful for meeting many educational goals. Kids have embraced them; schools can too.

“We’ve got a different generation of students—like it or not,” says Ann Flynn, director of education technology for the National School Boards Association. “Look at what kids are doing in their real life and how much schools differ from that.” There’s a real danger, Flynn says, that schools could get left behind in this ever-evolving information age.

On the other hand, the changes also create ample opportunity to engage students, to teach (and reinforce) basic lessons and advanced concepts. Many educators in California—the home, after all, of Silicon Valley and the broader technological revolution—are showing the way; here’s a sampling of some of their successes, and of challenges they’ve overcome.

‘Going in circles’—and ‘through the roof’

Two innovative technology programs in San Diego County’s Escondido Union High School District that are being eyed by other districts across the nation are a good place to start. In one, according to Kathy Shirley, director of Technology and Media Services for Escondido, who was instrumental in the launch of both programs, teachers are tapping into digital video production to entice kids to make movies about the lessons they study in class; in the other, they’re using iPods to increase students’ reading fluency.

Project LIVE, or Learning through Instructional Video in Education, trains educators to train their students to make video podcasts about the lessons they’re studying. (For the uninitiated, podcasts are multimedia files uploaded to the Internet for playback on a mobile device or a personal computer.)

In one math classroom, for example, students were having difficulty grasping the concepts of radius and diameter. With the help of a teacher, a group of the students created a podcast called “Going in Circles” that explained the geometric concepts through a story about pizza making. The students delved into several content standard areas in making the podcast. Not only did they have to understand what radii and diameters are, they also had to use their language arts skills to write story boards and scripts for the video; the writing was reviewed in a useful, real-world application of grammar and punctuation skills.

Project LIVE has also been used to teach content standards in science, history and other disciplines, according to Shirley. She says the novelty of the technology excites the students, drawing them into the activity in a way traditional classroom instruction might not.

Shirley says she saw the same excitement in students involved in her district’s other new technology program: iREAD, or I Record Education Audio Digitally.

Project iREAD also uses iPods, this time to increase students’ reading fluency. In iREAD, students read a selection into the iPod recorder. They then play back the audio and listen for mistakes in fluency. Hearing their own errors, rather than simply being told what they are doing wrong, greatly increases the students’ fluency improvement rates.

“You can tell them,” says Shirley. “but when they hear it themselves, the accuracy level goes through the roof.”

With iPods, educators can time- and date-stamp the recordings, compiling a digital record of students’ progress. Educators then have the flexibility to review the recordings over time. Typically, Shirley says, students in standard reading programs will show a five- to 10-word increase in fluency each week—but her district is seeing gains three to four times that large in classrooms using the iREAD method.

“It hooks kids into the hard practice and work they need to do to improve their reading,” Shirley explains.

iPod recordings also can be used to help students learn a second language, study their delivery of persuasive speeches and record poetry and other creative work. Some educators use iPods in the classroom to download songs or dramatic works that they want to play for their students. Used with speakers, the tool can be used to bring a wealth of resources to whole classrooms from the Web.

Help for at-risk kids

Michael Gordon, a teacher at the Media Communications Academy at Newark Memorial High School in Newark Unified School District in Alameda County, knows the attraction that cool media can have for students. Gordon now serves as the academy’s director following the retirement of Loren Pinto, who first conceived of the program, sought planning grants for it and directed it until his retirement this year.

Both men have watched at-risk kids get turned on to school through the Media Communications Academy, which is funded through the state as a career partnership academy intended to give the kids career or technical skills so they can find work upon graduation. Half of the enrollees are considered at-risk students.

The academy offers courses in Web design, graphic design, video production and other multimedia. Additionally, the core courses required for high school graduation, such as language arts, algebra and history, are delivered to students using many of the new technologies they are learning.

Gordon, for example, teaches social science and English; his students have used their technology studies to design brochures describing myths they’ve studied in language arts class. Some students make documentaries on historical events, while others design Web sites or magazines detailing specific themes or aspects of novels they’ve read.

Gordon says that applying the technology to their other studies energizes the students on many levels. The opportunity to learn to use the computer hardware and software excites them, and they realize that time-tested skills—learning to write, spell and use grammar correctly—are critical to success in the emerging careers the new technology is creating.

“They see a reason why they are learning these things,” says Gordon.

And that realization pays off, according to Pinto, Gordon’s predecessor as the academy’s head.

“Many of our students had serious attendance and academic problems. Many were on a pathway to dropping out of school,” Pinto reports. Instead, 170 students have graduated in the past five years. “Our graduation rate is near 98 percent. A personal phone call is made the year following graduation, and we were pleased to note that 85 to 90 percent of the students were attending college.”

From taboos to useful tools

Transitions can be difficult, and the communications revolution is no exception. Some of the digital devices that were once off-limits in the classroom, for example, are now being used to advance learning there. Social networking sites are a prime example. Some districts are allowing the use of educational social networking sites, properly vetted to be age-appropriate and curriculum-focused, so students separated by time or distance can communicate with each other about school work.

Epals, one of the more popular sites, boasts it’s “the Internet’s largest global community of connected classrooms,” linking more than 11 million students and teachers from 191 countries. Another site, Saywire, “powers safe social learning for K-20 teachers and students,” according to its Web site. Saywire helps “develop 21st century skills—not only by writing in blogs, wikis, eNotes, online word processors, and ePortfolios”—if you don’t know what those are, ask your kids—“but also through the practice of reading and critical thinking.”

These and other social networking sites allow students and teachers to e-mail each other and instant message (or IM, to its legions of practitioners) connecting as digital pen pals across time zones and national borders. Because they promote conversational communication and—especially with IM—require a rapid response, these online forms of communicating have proved to be powerful tools in the instruction of English language learners.

And why shouldn’t schools offer and use these online communication tools? asks Flynn, the NSBA education technology director. Students already spend hours on end on social networking sites at home. It is their form of communication.

“Creating and Connecting: Research and Guidelines on Online Social and Educational Networking,” a 2007 study by NSBA and Grunwald Associates, reports that many 9- to 17-year-olds surveyed said they spent as much time after school on social networking sites as they spent watching television. And a good portion of the time they spent on those sites, they spent talking about school.

Tech for teachers

The study also points out some of the potential that new media have for teachers. Course management systems are gaining in popularity. Moodle and Blackboard are examples of programs that allow teachers to post assignments, grades and attendance and to host Web forums and blogs related to their courses. Parents can have password-protected access to the same material so they can monitor their children’s progress.

In addition, some districts already offer structured online professional communities, and educators are encouraged to explore social networking sites for use in staff planning, communication and mentoring. Speaking of which, education technology wonks offer three magic words that they believe are the key to awesome technology programs in the classroom: sufficient professional development.

“The temptation is to spend all the money on the stuff and not spend the money on professional development,” says Flynn. She recommends that districts reserve 30 percent of their technology budget to make sure their staffs know how to get the most out of all those digital bells and whistles. After all, even the best widgets and gizmos are only as good as the people trained to wield them—even the smartest phones, for example, are still capable of reaching wrong numbers.

District officials shouldn’t be seduced by all the dazzling new technologies out there, policy experts caution. Just because the district next door may have a one-to-one student laptop program doesn’t mean that’s what’s needed in your district. The end goal should always be about student achievement and engagement; the technology is just one tool for reaching that goal.

“District officials need to back up and begin by asking, ‘What are our educational goals?’ ” says Flynn, “not ‘What technology is out there?’ ”

“What are your educational challenges in the classroom?” she continues. “Answer this and then, and only then, should you begin to look for technological solutions to these problems.”

Pamela Martineau is a freelance writer and teacher.

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