Ted Nellen article

"If the use of technology in the classroom is so simple, Ted, how come it hasn’t had more of an impact in classroom use and hasn’t changed education as you claim it could? Why isn’t it the panacea you claim?"

"Good question. The reason is simple, it is our fear of change. The solution is simple, too, but the path to that solution is very complex and fraught with obstacles." I see the problem to achieving the solution as threefold: the technology, the human element, and our educational culture. They are all related and each is an integral part to the reason technology has not had the chance to be a major influence on educational pedagogy and in educational change as I have seen and envision. I will speak of the parts, then the whole.

The first part of the problem is the technology. We have to begin with the hardware and software components. PC or MAC? Hardware has been the first major obstacle as this new technology brought with it a matter of choice and two different platforms. In addition they were obsolete in a short time that meant upgrades, expensive upgrades. Schools’ computers were obsolete within the first year and therefore schools were unable to keep pace with the driving economic aspect of the technology, or so they thought. Choices in software add to the confusion. Hardware and software vendors are used to simple business applications where workers perform similar, simple, and limited computer commands unlike the school that demands such varied uses of the computer. Business underutilizes its computer hardware and software power; whereas, the schools are limited by inferior hardware and software.

In schools, computers are not restricted to one user as they are in business. In my classes in NYC, my computers had as many as a dozen users each school day, that began at eight in the morning and ended at nine in the evening. It was a mistake to try to follow a business model of computer use in schools. This is one of many reasons why schools must go with wireless laptops and have one laptop per student. Computers are a new technology to society and as such present a new and sometimes a steep learning curve. Technology changes from hardware speed to software version so fast we can barely keep up. Compatibility between hardware platforms and software programs and even same software versions is a problem since they aren’t compatible. They are getting more compatible but there are lots of old hardware and software in the schools still. The pencil is still a simple basic piece of technology and has been relatively unchanged for hundreds of years. The costs of hardware and software are not provided for in schools.

Another problem in adapting the new technology is in maintenance. Maintaining the technology requires a high skilled person or a group of people to maintain the technology in schools. Unfortunately there isn’t money for this and teachers have to double in this capacity. There is the money for maintenance that can be costly. Schools don’t model corporations when it comes to maintenance. In business, I have been told there is one service person for every 60 computers, not so in schools. In fact schools do not consider maintenance contracts when they purchase computers as they do when they buy or rent photocopy machines. This raises an interesting idea about leasing computers rather than buying them. Corporations rent, schools buy. By renting computers rather than buying them, schools might be better off. This is a possible solution to the problem and requires new thinking to have change.

Another consideration in regards to the hardware is can the school support the electrical load required? Too many schools in this country do not have the electrical capability to support massive amounts of computers and all the peripherals. Once the hardware and software are in place the next problem is access to the Internet. Wiring the schools with cable becomes an obstacle to making these computers talk to each other and the Internet. A good solution might be to go wireless that requires less fiddling with the infrastructure of the school and than getting actual connectivity that can be costly for high speed access which is necessary with so many computers.

Once all of this is accomplished, ironically we find schools adding a filter to the Internet connection, which hamstrings all the work done since teachers and students are denied access to more good sites than they are protected from bad sites. It is my belief that the teacher is the best filter that you can read at http://www.tnellen.com/ted/filter.html. Scholars are supervised by teachers while in school; whereas, they are not by the parents in the home. To add insult to injury, a teacher in a school in NYC with a filter cannot access the state standards that are in PDF format because they cannot download ADOBE reader, the program needed to read the PDF file. However on that same computer that teacher can access porn sites, with ease. Another unsavory practice is domain name theft or cyber napping. This is the practice of porn sites watching for acceptable education sites that let their registrations expire. The porn nappers buy the site that has already been approved to be viewed by the school’s filter and presents porn or gambling and provides a link for the original owners to buy back the site at inflated prices. I guess this would be akin to the Good Humor trucks becoming drug dealers. You can go to the OII home page and follow the link to Report Cyber Squatting and Porn-napping or go directly to http://oii.org/html/porn-napping.shtml.

These are just some of the technology problems we need to overcome if we want the computers to work in the schools.

The second piece of the problem of poor integration of the technology in our schools is the human element, those who make the computers sing in our classrooms. Students, younger ones more than older ones are perhaps the most adroit with the technology, so they are not a major problem. Younger students know more about computers than do older students, since they have been born into a society already using them in many areas other than schools. In fact our younger students are born into families that already have some of its family members using computers as we were born into houses with televisions, and our parents born into families with a radio and so on. Computers are second nature to the younger student. However, students of all ages are all too familiar with the classic teacher dominated classroom, lessons in blocks and all on the same page. Students are so used to the spoon feeding type of education that they are not that capable of knowing how to use the computer in the classroom. When I first started using computers in my public high school English class in 1984 students would walk into my 17 computer classroom, see the computers and look at their program and say, "Is this English?" I would respond in the affirmative and invite them in. They were bewildered, this didn’t look like an English class this looked like a computer class. That is the problem. Students were never provided the possibility of using computers in any class they take. That is changing especially at the higher education level, but not enough and not fast enough at the K-12 level. The reason for that is of course the teachers in the classroom do not use the computer in the classroom even if they do use them to prepare their lessons for that class. Teachers type up lesson plans, handouts, quizzes, tests and more and then print them out and make copies, instead of emailing this to their students or even posting them on a website.

Learning how to use the computers in the classroom requires staff development which is not a high priority in most schools as it is in corporations which mass train its employees at a high cost initially, but with a high return on investment. Schools rely on teachers teaching themselves too much or by training too few and sometimes the wrong ones. In NYC when we do staff development in schools, the teachers who have priority are the senior teachers as we are unionized. I have trained 20 teachers at a clip in some schools only to have one quarter of them retire or go on sabbatical the next year. These teachers know this and take these courses anyway taking a seat from a teacher who will give back their new skill to the students in that school. Staff development is also not a consideration in grant writing or money allocation in schools. This doesn’t seem to be a consideration when so much money is assigned to the hardware and software and other technology considerations as outlined above. There just isn’t enough money for staff development to make the teachers comfortable or efficient in using the technology in the classroom.

Teachers more than students are not familiar enough with the technology in their own lives and probably never used them in their own schooling. So it is difficult for them to envision how to use them other than as drill and kill machines or as electronic textbooks. They don’t or cant imagine the interactive quality especially since they don’t use it that way themselves in most cases. Their understanding and use of prior technology is one way technology like the television, movie, radio and the like. In fact in many classes the method of delivery is usually one way a lecture. Interactive classrooms are not the model and are not a reality even in the best of cases. In a classroom of 34 students which meets for 45 minutes a day, each student has only one minute if only one student at a time speaks or answers a teacher question. Of course if the class is working in groups that number increases only by the number of groups. Too few students participate in the 6 hour school day. By this math a student could spend only 6 minutes a day in her own active education, hardly effective. Listening to other students is not learning. And then how much time is spent by teacher repeating her questions or quieting students down so one student can speak? We must consider classroom management in the teacher dominated classroom. Are the full 45 minute classes using all 45 minutes for education? No. getting teachers past technophobia or further along than simply using a word processor is requires lots of staff development and even team teaching.

This raises another problem in that teachers usually work alone in their classrooms and with their doors closed. The technology allows for interactive and cross curricular learning and yet we continue with one way learning and single discipline classrooms. In too many of the criticisms leveled at schools for ineffective use of the technology, the teacher bears most of the blame.

This is unfortunate as it isn’t the teachers’ fault. Administrators bear much of this blame for not providing money for staff development, money for team teaching, time to do all of this, and plain advocacy and support. Another fault of the administrator is that s/he uses the computer less than the teacher if at all. Administrators should be using email and webpages to communicate with the staff, students, and parents. In many cases we hear that a school has a computer connected to the Internet, but that computer is on the principal's desk and is not being used and is collecting dust. Principals are the ones responsible for the computers and oftentimes leave them in the boxes in storage past the warranties before setting them up in a room for lack of proper security. Much of the culture of school use does start with the administrators and is encouraged by the principal. Their use for administrative purposes could begin the process of using the computers in the school by using email, lists, and discussions for school business and by creating and maintaining a school webpage for use by the school community of students, teachers, staff, and parents.

Parents may have computers for their children, and in too many cases that computer use is not moderated as is in schools. Parents use computers in different ways. They may use it to find information on health for their parents, friends, or family. They purchase things on line. They may read papers or journals. They may even use it for rudimentary email for work and a few of their wired friends. But all in all they use it as they do the television, radio, or print media as one way methods of gathering information. Some parents may put up family webpages. But all in all parents aren’t Internet savvy and therefore of little use in promoting its use for their children in school. Then if parents know nothing or very little about computers, they are hesitant to buy one for their children as they will be of little assistance in its use. Many families can’t afford the added expense of another electronic toy. Even if parents use them at work, it is usually limited experience and single program use. Society certainly presents the largest picture of computer use and need.

The importance of the computer in business is very obvious from government down to the mom and pop operation. However, the applications are very limited compared to what is needed in schools and therefore easier to maintain and certainly does not give the parent the necessary computer skills to be helpful for their child. Business expects students to become productive workers so therefore demands some computer proficiency, but also demands high standards delivered and assessed via the high stakes tests. The human element is myriad and very complex in the failure of successful implementation of the computers in our classrooms.

The third and final component of the problem is the culture of schools. America has never really agreed about the purpose of schools, but babysitting seems high on the list and a constant. Consider how parents react when there is a school holiday or how folks react to school vacations. Laws keep kids in schools up until a certain age that corresponds with work age. We even have truant officers keeping kids off the streets and putting them back in schools. Attendance is important, even more important than what happens when these kids are off the streets or not home alone and in schools. We may expect a great deal from schools, but we don’t provide much financial support to accomplish those lofty tasks. This is most obvious as the school has not changed in its method of delivery of information in the past three hundred years. Consider the fact that a teacher from any of the past centuries has not changed much except her clothes. A teacher from any of the past centuries could walk into any classroom in the 21st century and teach. Is this so in any other profession in this country? Trying to change the education culture is very difficult as much of the decision about change is made by non-pedagogues and is based on one owns school experience as a student. How often do we hear adults mention their own schooling when speaking about their frustrations with schools nowadays? "When I was in school.." is too often the death knell to any constructive discussion of educational change. Schools continue to use the modular class structure of the average of 50 minute classes for each discipline in high school.

Students move around the halls going from class to class, spending more time during the day in set up and break down in each class and moving around then in sitting in the classes. With class sizes of say 34, as they are in the NYC high schools in a 45 minute class, students get about one minute of education in this traditional class if all students are to be served and to be involved in the class. Experiments in changing the school culture abound with many pilots and too little long range implementation in schools or school districts. Lots of studies are made about schools and change without much implementation or practice. School culture and educational policy is the result of pedagogy and politics. These two components of educational policy form the two extremes between which the pendulum swings as policy is made. Education is considered one of the most important elements to maintain democracy and is one of the main issues in any election. The teaching profession is considered the noble profession and teachers considered the most important people in our society. Even with this attention, it is surprising how little education practice has changed over the past three centuries.

Now that I have outlined the three elements necessary to consider in educational change and the failure for the successful implementation of technology in our schools; I would like to examine this dire situation alluding to these three elements as they are related and intertwined. Change will happen only when a number of pieces change in unison or with the knowledge of a plan and holding to it and supporting it. We don’t enter the change mode with an open mind as we must think outside the box. We need the light pen used in Men in Black to erase old ways and methods of evaluation, so that we may actually employ new methods.

The biggest obstacle in technology is the filter that hamstrings the very technology we put in the schools. The high stakes tests hamstring any meaningful form of instruction in the classroom. Our own remembrances of school and how it was, hamstrings any concepts of a different classroom from the one we knew. These three hamstringing obstacles represent for me the main reasons for ineffective change as the respective problem for each element as outlined above. The technology is not completely working and causes frustration to the students and teachers trying to use it. The computer is malfunctioning. The software isn’t the right version. The Internet connection is down or slow. We haven’t harnessed the technology aspect to make it transparent and simple. The competitive nature of vendors always puts us behind a technology curve, in a constant catch up mode. Technology is too malleable for the classroom and needs to be harnessed. One way I achieved this was to put a LINUX box, (a computer which runs LINUX, the freeware version of UNIX.) in my classroom. This way I could download Internet sites to it and run locally on my classroom computers. But this of course requires a great deal of technology know how to do this and this is not available or desired by all teachers. It requires a technician and they are few and far between in schools, but not in business. But remember, business is running far fewer applications than are schools and business does not utilize the full power of most software applications as do schools. A student in a school could use the entire Microsoft suite all day long in all of her classes.

In business, we find individuals working on certain applications and coordinating her efforts with others. Then add the various educational software applications and we have students multitasking unlike those in business. So with the lack of technical support and many uses of software in schools, it is unfair and not appropriate to compare schools with business, unless society and business begin to provide the same support to schools that is afforded business. Next, we train teachers and they don’t have the technology to implement their new learned pedagogical strategies. We train teachers after the workday or on their free time.

In business, they are trained during the workday. Too often teachers are also the technician in the school, so that this added job usually devoted to one or more full time employees in business is an add-on to a teacher who may or may not be compensated with a class or more off or extra pay. As teachers are trained in a constructivist philosophy about the use of the technology, they reenter the classroom of the past, a teacher led and dominated room to a roomful of students expecting and knowing only this kind of classroom.

Change confuses the student too. Students are not tapped for their prior knowledge about technology and too often the technology is used as drill and kill or students are kept on the same page with their classmates. Business as it always has wants the schools to create workers, parents to prepare the children for college, colleges want schools to prepare them for further scholarship and so on. So many demands with so few resources and so little imagination in educational practice in our schools can only result in failure and frustration. Schools have operated in a similar fashion for nearly 300 years in America. We follow an agrarian calendar still with a summer vacation so the children can help in the fields. Why? We have moved from agrarian to industrial to information ages and yet schools are caught in the time warp of an agrarian calendar. If we can’t adjust this calendar how can we expect to change education?

We still have students moving from class to class learning a different discipline each hour. There is no or little coordination between the subjects as each student moves about in and on her own schedule with different teachers and students in each class. There is little coordination with keeping the students together. Too much time is spent in setting up and breaking down at the beginnings and ends of hour long classes and then there is the time between classes. Lots of wasted time in school as we see just on the logistics of changing classes. Why change classes? Why not have the students enter school and go to a desk, as they do in business and have the teachers move around all day long and coordinate with other teachers to team teach as they roam. With wireless laptops and students assembling in large classrooms ready to receive a variety of teachers classrooms could be arranged in whatever configuration to accomplish the given task. For instance, let us say a unit of instruction in using the "bicycle," as the main theme. We would need a math, physics, science, social studies, business, physical education, art, English teachers present to provide their own perspective on the "bicycle" as it is important in each of these disciplines. This way we would be able to reach all students through their desire and appreciation of the bicycle and thereby be able to use that as a springboard to introduce the other disciplines. Consider further when a teacher speaks of Ben Franklin. That teacher needs to know about this man as an English, history and science teacher. This is asking a bit much of any human. It requires many humans to do the job right. The newly designed classroom would allow for many teachers being present during this kind of new instruction.

Computers have provided the tool for us to realize Dewey’s ideas of learning by doing. They have provided us with the tool to satisfy the SCANS demands. Computers promote scholarship for the student. Computers provide the power to help teachers teach learners how to learn. Instead of giving the information, teachers can allow for an environment in which students learn how to learn through inquiry and by doing. To my way of thinking for computers to have an impact on education, we have to change a great deal of what we know about schools and instruction as practiced these last 300 years. To get out of the box, we may have to tear down such pretty formidable walls and ideas about education and begin to practice them without putting ourselves back in the box and stop evaluating based on traditional methods. We have changed how business is run, how government works, how life is lived, how war is waged in these past 300 years and yet we have not changed how schools have operated.