dy/dan » Blog Archive » Dodging My Tech Coordinator

Noted edutech skeptic, Dan Meyer, talks about his experience using technology in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, and reflects on how it went.

• We can debate the merits of my state’s content standards, fine, but you can’t ask me to defy my employers, simultaneously setting my students up to fail in their next class, all so BJ Nesbitt won’t think I’m a lousy teacher. I mean, if that’s integral to the master plan, we have some work to do.
• For serious: if I never saw another stony-faced child staring grimly at the camera, holding a hand-scrawled sign denouncing her out-of-touch, digital-immigrant teacher for not letting her SMS her iPod playlist to her Facebook group (or whatever) during class it would be too soon.
• Really, if you can show me gains along any of those vectors without losing the others, you’ll be my valentine.

I think part of why people read Dan, and why I have readers (although a lot fewer) is that people like to see someone break it down, and talk about teaching a lesson. They want to know what worked, and what didn’t. We are all (or almost all) the lone adult/professional in our classrooms, this reflection is one of the ways we can keep ourselves honest about what we are doing as professionals. I appreciate that Dan tried technology, and then took the time to list what the obstacles would be to full tech adoption in his classroom.

There may be folks out there that think it’s all about the technology, and just throw it out there, and it (knowledge) will stick. I’m not one of those types. I want my lessons to be embedded in a standard, and although I think many of the standards for elementary are plain nuts (and developmentally inappropriate) in my state, there are many that are great, and worthwhile, and worth teaching, and aren’t about recall skills. In the interest of sharing here is this week’s reflection:

What I’ve been doing with fifth graders this week

I have been setting up a research project on the Revolutionary War with Fifth Graders. My key approach is, “Less is more.” I’m having them only do four events for a timeline, and write about 2-4 sentences for each event. The kids have gotten in a nasty habit of cutting and pasting whole sections of the Internet which is NOT LEARNING! I think by having them concentrate on summarizing a single event and structuring it well, they will be doing more of their own analysis, and less plagiarizing. My presentation at SCOE next week (it’ll be streamed folks), will focus on this.

I am still working on the coordinating graphing VoiceThread with fourth graders. I don’t have a strong feeling of failure or success yet, so I want to wait to post about it. I discovered a number of problems with the project (kids not being able to see the coordinates on our low resolution VDTs, kids needing the numbers on the grid) that I’m fixing in this week’s version, but I will let all of you know what’s going on after this week.