so a couple days ago i'm looking around on youtube and this video pops up on my feed published by the
economist called how technology will transform your kids education and initially i was really
pleased to see that video because there's actually not a lot that's discussed in national news
about how technology can have a positive impact on education the majority of the
conversation is around when can we get back to in-person classrooms as soon as possible so i
took a look at the video i also took a look at the comments and there's a whole plethora of anti-tech
sentiments in there it's kind of interesting you should check it out the video definitely
brings up some valid points like the fact that the education sector has been particularly slow
to adopt new technologies they also make the argument that the pandemic galvanized a tech
celebration in education which i definitely agree with but unfortunately where the video is lacking
a little bit is in the way that it describes how technology can be used to transform education
so it focuses primarily on two main categories one of those is personalized learning programs
where students are basically on a program that's using artificial intelligence to assess
students current skill levels and then give them lessons and resources at their exact skill level
and then they also focus on this kind of random program where some teachers at a teacher education
school are teaching avatars of students as opposed to real students as a way to build their skills
interested in you know what life was like for the boy i do think personalized learning will likely
play a significant role in the future of education and sure maybe we can also practice our teaching
skills by teaching avatars of students rather than real ones but i think there are clearly some other
more impactful ways that we can use technology to transform education and i also think that
if some of the people who express negativity in the comments heard these arguments i might
be able to change their mind and i know that's true because i used to be a tech skeptic myself
first technology is the most practical way to help educators build interactive classrooms even
though decades of research show that active participation is more effective for learning
there's still a decent amount of resistance to that model educators because they've mostly
known just one way of teaching and learning for most of their lives and that's probably how they
experienced education just like how i experienced education but then students can also be resistant
to the idea of active participation too why because active participation is hard i recently
experienced this for myself in a class that i'm taking about storytelling part of the class takes
place online and the direct instruction usually happens via video i've watched all the videos
and done all the activities and i started thinking to myself hey i'm learning how to
do this storytelling thing at least that's what i thought the most recent assignment was that
i actually had to tell a story to the rest of the entire group over zoom and it was way harder than
i anticipated it turns out that watching the videos and doing the activities wasn't quite
enough in fact i haven't felt so uncomfortable in a very long time i wanted to slink away and
find a place to hide but did i learn something much deeper about storytelling by actually having
to go through the action of telling one absolutely now of course active participation doesn't require
technology you can randomize calling on students with popsicle sticks you can do turn and talks you
can give students mini whiteboards so they write their responses down but with technology tools
like paradec nearpod whiteboard 5 just to name a few you can pretty much instantly turn a passive
participation class into a classroom where 100 of students participate throughout an entire lesson
the teacher can see their responses coming through in real time and you can pull reports after the
fact that you can use to make decisions about how to group students you can also use those reports
for parent conferences and so on technology also helps teachers extend active participation beyond
interactive presentations to creating interactive content every single teacher in the world gives
students articles to read videos to watch web pages to visit as a way for students to gather
more information about whatever it is that they're learning the problem it's virtually impossible for
teachers to know if students are understanding the material and perhaps more importantly
it's just as challenging for students to know whether or not they're getting the key ideas
while they're reading that article or watching that video that's because most the time we wait
until after they've read the article or watched the video or visited the webpage to ask them
comprehension questions but the problem is that if a student has challenges with comprehension like
many students do or if we are exposing students to texts or concepts that are a little bit above
their level then just asking questions at the very end isn't doing anything to support them
with increasing comprehension what does support increasing comprehension is chunking text and
videos into smaller segments and then embedding checks for understanding to help students hone in
on key ideas it's a simple shift but using edtech apps to turn all static content into interactive
content helps make learning more sticky for students it helps teachers better understand
what their students know and don't know it helps students self-monitor their own understanding
and it also frees up educators time to actually be doing some small group instruction and teaching
instead of grading those types of activities it's pretty much an undisputable win-win
that would be almost impossible to achieve without technology and if you're looking for
ways to make your static content interactive the next time you want to play a video just go check
the edpuzzle library to see if it's already been made interactive by other educators and if you
want to supplement your curriculum with an article hop over to actively learn to see if there's an
article that's already been made interactive in that platform and if you want to assign students
a web page you can even upload it into actively learn and add interactive questions to that
as well if you're going to have students check out images just upload that image to a program like
cami which will make it interactive so students can draw directly on top of it to make meaning
out of it that leads me to the next point about how technology can be used to transform education
and that's to help make learning more accessible accessibility means a lot of different things but
it really boils down to this how can we stretch out our hand to meet students where they're at
rather than expecting students to learn what we're teaching no matter where they're at one clear way
the technology can help us make learning more accessible is through asynchronous instruction
so rather than or in addition to teaching on a physical whiteboard with a marker if we use a
digital whiteboard and a screen recording tool we can then preserve that lesson for students to be
able to watch on their own time at their own pace and you can still have paper copies of lessons and
resources and things like that it's just that digitizing your curriculum makes it inherently
more accessible of course accessibility extends far beyond just making lesson materials more
available technological tools help educators open up their curriculums in ways that would be very
challenging to do without technology for example if a student struggles with reading or writing
they can use a speech-to-text or text-to-speech tool and in general technology just helps us
give students multiple means of accessing the information that we're teaching so instead of
expecting students to all learn information from the single textbook that we use in class
we can offer them leveled text so that they're reading that information at their just right level
we can give them video audio recordings multimedia rich presentations web page resources and so on
what's more technology helps us expand what counts as academic in our classrooms there's
really no reason to limit students to showing their understanding through traditional means of
assessment like quizzes essays and presentations we don't have to get rid of those entirely but we
can also give students the opportunity to show what they've learned through making a podcast
by creating a video by designing a solution to a real world problem and then printing that solution
out using a 3d printer unless we make an effort to change what school means school will forever be
something that works for some students and doesn't work for others we can change that and technology
can play a key role in how we pull it off and that leads me to my last point about a key way
technology can transform education and that's helping students take greater ownership over
their own learning helping students take greater ownership over their own learning is one of the
most profound shifts that we can make in our classrooms it's a shift that dramatically
impacts both teachers and students one of the main reasons why teaching is so stressful and tiring
is that it often feels like we're the ones doing all the heavy lifting in class and students often
feel a lack of control over their day-to-day lives and feel as though compulsory k-12 education has
been forced upon them and that's often the reason why students act out in class when i first started
teaching i was literally the world's worst teacher my first year was absolute living hell it was
so bad i don't think there was ever a moment my entire first year when every kid in the classroom
was sitting in their seat at the same time in fact it was so bad that a fight once broke out
in my class and i didn't even know that the fight had happened because my class was just
that chaotic my first year teaching i gained about 25 pounds practically became an alcoholic and
broke up with my girlfriend of over five years i truly hated my life and at that time i hated
teaching now my experience was definitely on the negative side of the spectrum and it was largely
because i totally lacked the skills necessary to be an effective teacher and i'm not gonna lie it's
not like i made some change that transformed everything overnight but what i did learn is
that the more responsibility i transferred to my students the easier my job became and the
more my students were learning there are lots of steps we can take to cultivate student agency in
our classrooms but the most important step that i took was helping students understand exactly
where they're at academically and then understand exactly what they need to do in order to improve
tracking one's own data and progress toward reaching goals is an extensively documented
research-based way to help people achieve what they want to achieve in life it's how i personally
went from only being able to swim maybe one length of a pool and run a couple of miles
to being able to swim 2.4 miles bike 112 and run 26.2 back to back in a single day without stopping
it's also a key suggestion that james clear makes in his best-selling book atomic habits
about effective ways to change habits and improve now yes of course students could do all of this
data tracking on paper but technology makes it indisputably easier for students to track
their progress over the course of a single year and even across multiple years it also makes it
a lot less likely that they're going to lose their tracker at the bottom of their backpack
and it's not just self-progress monitoring students can also curate their own work to
store in a digital portfolio and then they can reflect on how that work shows their learning
growth over an extended period of time you can easily create a data tracker in google sheets
and i'll put the link to be able to download the one that i just showed in the video description
and if you're interested in learning more about how to use digital portfolios in your classroom
to have students curate work and reflect on it and even use that for a student-led
conference then i highly recommend you check out that playlist above to learn all about it