Flipping Education

  Originally posted on February 20, 2013on Edtech Digest

As education follows the rest of the world to the cloud, there’s a new paradigm on the horizon
CLASSROOM 21 | by Greg Limperis
Things have to change in education, and soon. Everything’s moving to the cloud. For educators, this means a change in their method of curriculum delivery. What could possibly delay such a universal education transformation in this country? Universal access. Every school needs it: broadband and WiFi. And where, in the Industrial Age, it was workers prepared for work in factories — today, we need prepared educators for a Global Information Age.
Looking back, during the Industrial Age schools needed textbooks. Printing presses and the shipping industry got humming so all students, no matter how rural or inner-city, could access similar curriculum cheaply. That meant infrastructure: roads, school locations and so on. Over time, this became reality. With advancements in the auto and shipping industries, every school sooner or later was largely able to get their hands on great, affordable curriculum.
Once again, we stand at a crossroads. Today, all of the great curriculum and other education resources that are and will be delivered will be stored in the cloud. Textbook manufacturing? Rest in peace. The advent of a digital curriculum is now upon us. But access to this curriculum? This requires broadband or satellite connections. And this has become the true challenge for our country: can we give equitable access to every school? As soon as every school has access to broadband sufficient to support streaming on memory-intensive content such as video, audio and animation, then the next real challenge will be to outfit every school with WiFi so as to make this content portable.
Low-cost hardware is here. The future is upon us. We’re simply waiting for education to catch up. But if we truly want to provide our children with 21^st-century skills, then we must give them a 21^st-century schoolhouse: broadband must reach broadly, to all schools. If we can do it with electricity, then there’s certainly no logical reason that we can’t do it with broadband and satellite.
Do we want to truly transform education? We need to consider our priorities. For example, do we want to improve more physical roads or should we be improving our digital highways? During the last Great Depression, we built highways across America. So why, during the current downturn, can we not put people to work in building our much-needed digital highways? We must give everyone the same access.
Accomplish this, and the rest will follow. Textbooks replaced with e-books, and an e-reader in every child’s hands. Tablets? The norm. The cost and savings to our environment will push the issue, and moving in this direction is even now becoming our only real choice.
Devices will soon self-charge and run on solar power. Schools will become places of light where windows provide classrooms energy. School hours will maximize daylight and schools will run all year deploying stored energy gathered on site as needed. Green school buildings will maximize sun, wind, water and waste. They’ll be cooled and heated more naturally through proper placement of campus-grown vegetation. Rooftops will be places for plants; solar-paneled building sides will help. Captured rainwater will also produce power. Schools will look like homes, rows replaced by open meeting spaces and comfy couches. Small, quiet rooms will provide undistracted study and work areas. And, last but not least, the learning day will flip: what can be taught in a lesson period will take place during free time or evenings. ‘Home’ work and practice will take place in school, ensuring understanding and competence. Group projects will be the norm on interactive tabletops.
Thanks to this new broadband access, parents will work from their smart homes while students will be given the option to connect from home a few times per week if needed; no longer will they be required to physically attend every day of school. Parental support will also be more readily available. A constant connection to the child will be common in this new network of learning.
Tablets will replace backpacks; WiFi classrooms will connect students to unlimited learning tools and resources purchased in bulk by state departments of education and provided as options to schools all feeding into a network of central super computers.
Student performance data will be stored instantly on these super servers at state level and will eliminate the need for most current-day data reporting. State testing will become a thing of the past, replaced by real-time data of student work instantly available to administrators through proper network access. One will always be up on what the child knows and how they compare to their peers.
Digital portfolios of student work will be the norm. A digital footprint for students will be like fossils left in bedrock. All of their work from all of their schooling will be stored and tracked so as to monitor growth and provide immediate intervention as needed. And where will all of this be stored? In the cloud. New positions will open up at the state level for tracking and flagging deficiencies noted in students through online work alerts, notices pinged to educators along with the appropriate customized intervention plan in support of that particular child’s digital learning path.
Teachers will never be replaced — they will, however, evolve. The teacher will become something totally different, a facilitator of knowledge, helping to ensure student learning is accessible and ubiquitous and showing each student the way forward along each student’s own self-selected learning path. It’s time we start to think about the future of education — and to know that, in that future of abundant learning choices and considering where we are currently, we have no choice but to flip learning.

The Digital Revolt

Who is with me? Are you ready to revolt? I am not talking about a digital revolution, I want a revolt. I am tired of hearing we are not ready for that. It costs too much. We do not have the money. That could be dangerous.

Every time someone talks about a new EdTech initiative, the naysayers come out. They have a reason for everything. The teachers are not ready. Our students might do something or go some place we do not want them to go. Where are we going to get money for that? It is not fair and it does not make sense.

Every time you naysayers come out and suggest updating your textbooks, did I or anyone else complain and say where are we going to get money for that so much that you ended up not doing it? Did I or anyone else complain so much when you loaded my child's backpack up with books enough that he or she could barely walk? Did that stop you from giving them work to take home? Did I cry foul at the cost of materials so much that you ended up not buying any? How about the time when you instituted a new curriculum? Did I ever tell you we could never do it because our teacher's were not ready? I think all of you know these answers.

So I ask you my tech supporting friends, why do we put up with it and allow others to refuse us to implement that which we know really will change the way our teachers teach and our students learn? How much could it really cost? How hard would it really be to get our staff and students ready for it? Would it honestly be any more dangerous for our students then if we pretended it did not exist and then allow them to go home and use it unmonitored and uninformed.

How about if we did this? Let's revolt together and come up with a modern day school. What would it look like? What would we keep and what would thankfully go away? Do we need the agrarian schedule anymore? Does 8:00 am to 3:00 pm for all our students even work anymore? Could we have school that started at different times for different people?

Let's do it. Let's start a school that has no textbooks or paper books. Lets give out students nothing but a tablet and some great apps. Lets make every classroom wifi accessible. Maybe we could even have a few laptops available too. If we did away with most of the paper print there would be little ink to buy. No printer to be repaired. No heavy textbooks to carry around. All there would be would is one tablet and possibly a laptop. Ok we can have some sheets of paper floating around here and there in case we need it. Students, family and community would all connect to the school through a LMS website builder like Blackboard Engage. All digital forms and anything that was once done on paper will now be done there.

There would be no expensive CAT 5 wiring to run everywhere. The building will be wireless with a staff, student and visitor access point to the network everywhere. Connectivity will be king. The school will be social. Students and staff will be encouraged to be social online. We will tweet. We will have digital footprints.

All of this will not go without any training. On the contrary. There will not be countless hours of curriculum training, meetings, etc. It will not be face to face training though because training will happen anywhere and anytime thanks to social sites, video conferencing and access to online collaboration tools and sites. Instead, we will invest heavily in great EdTech trainers who will be available for support for all of our staff throughout the whole building all day long. They will also be our technicians who can and also fix things for us as needed. They will be adapt at both the tech and the Ed side. Instead of staff meetings we will have app meetings. We will share great technology resources all the time. Anything business related can be said online. After all, time in education is precious.

The day and the classroom will be flipped. The course offering will be individualized to each child's needs. They will be online and customized. Their will alway be access to content, resources and results live and online daily.

How much money will we save if we do not buy textbooks. There will be no need for notebooks, whiteboards and or paper resources. There will be no two to three computers in the back of every classroom. There will be no student response systems, no interactive whiteboards and definitely no document cameras. Every student will have an iPad and a stylus. Each tablet will be loaded with word processing and note taking apps.

Students will be expected to add other app and software themselves just as we currently expect them to buy notebooks, pencils, pens and other resources to help offset the cost. The teacher will have a laptop to help them with larger more intensive work that is not able to easily be accomplished on the tablet. Content will not be blocked. The Internet will be completely accessible but there will be extensive training for staff and students from day one on leaving a digital footprint. What is an acceptable use of technology? There will be an Acceptable Use Policy and it will be followed. Violation of it will not be tolerated.

School will be engaging. It will be collaborative. It will be fun. Think of the possibilities. What if we knew nothing of school and we were to start building one today. What would it look like? What would we use? How would we fund it? Why not have corporate schools? Schools funded by companies producing the workers they want. Competition for the best workers brought about by their own schools. Couldn't we get some companies to invest in this. Couldn't we make it so kids wanted to come so much that they competed to get into it. The options here are endless.

We need to stop talking and start doing. What are we waiting for. Change will come if you wait. Why wait. Let's bring change to those who want to think or talk about it. I do not want to be a thought leader. I want to be a do leader. How about you?

It Isn't a Game Anymore

Origionally posted on Edtech Digest

Are we putting our edtech efforts in the right place?
CLASSROOM 21 | by Greg Limperis
Almost twenty years ago, I went to college for my Masters in Education. Back then, there were people like I am now: halfway through their teaching careers teaching students while they themselves had no (or very little) experience with modern-day technology in their lives. For many of them, cutting-edge growing up meant showing one’s vacation pictures via a slideshow or movie reel. The slideshow was not the kind we know today. It was a carousel of pictures projected onto a wall or screen with one loud, mechanical-sounding click at a time. They had very little experience using new digital cameras because, for most of them, film was still the way pictures were taken. Speaking of film, if one was lucky enough to grow up with video, then their experience was with a big-reel movie projector and not the VCR tapes that I grew up with.
I remember in my Masters course at Boston College being introduced to the concept of “teaching with technology.” My mathematics professor showed us how we could use an Apple II to plot points and make an object move around across the screen. This technology, as he would explain it to us, would help make plotting in math more engaging for our students. Personal computers and the Internet were just coming out in force and we were using them for research and typing papers — but there was little to no discussion on how one could use this device to better educate our students. We were not adequately prepared to teach with the technology that was, at the time, being simultaneously being purchased in schools for teachers to use.
I was one of the lucky ones growing up: we had a VCR in my house. Yes, we had slideshows, but we also had movies via video cassette—this was great! We had technology. I also had one of the first game systems to hit the market — I had a Colecovision. With that, we had the attachment to play Nintendo games as well. We were playing Donkey Kong, Qbert and so much more. When one of the first home PCs came out, I took my paper route money and I bought a Commodore 64. At an early age, I was introduced to DOS code, “saving to disk” — and so much more.
Years later, when I was given my first student-teacher classroom to teach in, I was lucky. Placed in a brand-new, state-of-the-art school with six computers per class with one on every teacher’s desk, in my first year of teaching full-time at that school I was also given a laptop and access to a school television studio. Don’t get me wrong — I wasn’t given much training on how to integrate all of this technology in my college teacher prep classes, and very little at the school I was at. If I was not that lucky kid growing up with all of this technology in my household, I’m sure I might have found implementing its use into my daily teaching a bit intimidating. I know my peers did. Yet, like most school systems then, the district kept throwing more technology at us with very little training.
However, it wasn’t their fault. Most of the district administrators didn’t grow up with technology, so knowing how to integrate it well into teaching was likewise foreign to them. As far as they knew, the training they were offering their staff was sufficient. Their staff would just have to figure it out as they assumed everyone else was doing. Colleges were not giving teachers the training they needed with technology, and neither was their district. Even if a staff member thought they did get adequate training, I am willing to bet it was fair at best.
Fast forward to almost twenty years later. Kids these days are growing up with multiple devices almost attached to them as if an appendage. They have cell phones, e-readers, tablets, laptops, computers, high-powered gaming consuls, netbooks, MP3 players and more. Not to mention DVRs, digital content, the cloud, and apps are all part of their daily lives. Their lingo includes words that didn’t exist when I was growing up, minus the cloud, but that meant those things in the sky on a crummy day.
Teachers these days are expected to be able to teach to these kids with instruments they are used to using much the same as it was for me twenty years earlier. Back then, we were given equipment with very little training on how best to integrate it into our teaching. For many of us, the same happens today. Students are coming out of college not being shown how best to integrate some of this technology because, in fairness, the professors training them simply didn’t grow up with it — and, for many of them, their knowledge on how best to integrate technology is also fair, at best. Districts are still throwing tons of software and hardware at our teachers. Though, leaders like me are doing much the same. Just the other day, I must have shared out almost one hundred sites, apps or articles about great tech integration without any way of making sure teachers would know how best to integrate these resources.
I couldn’t help but think while sharing them that our efforts are in the wrong place. My teachers have little extra time in their day. If they’re lucky enough to come across these resources, those who have the energy or luxury to look at them won’t even know where to start. When they had the time in college, they were never shown how best to use these tools — and if they were — then they are changing so quick, it is almost impossible to keep up with them.
We as professors, thought leaders and administrators need to do more. We need to become professional in how to integrate this technology and then when we do so, we need to get that knowledge in the hands of our teachers. We need to give them just as much professional development as we give them product. We need to start off all of our training when it comes to technology much the same as I start mine. One of the first things I say when I begin a training session is, “Please have me back out and let you learn it.” It’s also one of the last things I say. We need to make ourselves available when our teachers have time so we can give them the help they need. Our colleges need to get their hands on the equipment they possibly may use during a school year and they need to teach those prospective educators how to best integrate that technology on a regular basis. We need to lead by example. If we expect our teachers to integrate technology into their teaching, then we need to integrate it into our training just the same. We need to lead by example.
It’s about time we start to do more, give more, train more — and buy less. According to an article I read the other day, analysts think the edtech budget is about to burst. In my mind, that’s because, for too long, we’ve put money in the wrong place. We’ve made countless great products — many that do the same thing as others with a slight variation, yet so few provide our educators with what they need most — not options, but opinions. How we use the technology will far outweigh what technology we have.