In the year twenty twenty

In the fall of 1986, I took a graduate education class entitled Major Philosophies of Education. It was a night class that met three hours once a week face-to-face, of course (no online opportunities yet). One of the requirements of the course was a group project (no wiki here) to create a school based on a philosophy of our own choosing. So our group set out to decide what our philosophy would be and how our entire school system would be structured (with pen and paper). Now as I remember correctly, my group of four was pretty forward thinking. And note that at the time, there were no personal computers, cell phones, and even video cameras were like dinosaurs. However, we came up with a philosophy called “elitism.” And the basis of our philosophy was that each student in our district would have a computer in which they were capable of connecting with their school district and teachers and subject area content and able to pretty much be virtually linked to their school 24/7. We even presented our project in video format (way before podcasting and YouTube). Pretty elite (and good foresight I must say) for 1986, huh? Fast forward to now . . . 2007. Elitism, as my 1986 educational philosophy project described, is reality. Wow, have we come a long way in 20 years.

So what will our world and education be like in 14 years from now in the year 2020? First, there will still be the elite--those that have the most up-to-the-minute technology devices and access to the coolest online tools. That reality will never change. As much as we might like to think, believe, or dream that the world and education will even itself out, that no child will be left behind, there will always be the underprivileged. When I first began teaching with computers in my classroom one of the first questions I would ask my students at the beginning of the school year was, “Who has a computer in their home?” Two or three hands would raise per class. As the years passed, those students became the minority. Now every student has at least one computer in their household.

The world will become flatter, smaller, and more connected as we reach the year 2020. Web 2.0 will continue to evolve and flourish. The masses of people, and by masses I mean people of all ages and all walks of life, will continue to add content to the World Wide Web and to learn and grow from and with each other. The Web will be alive, live, real time, no wait, 24/7 with internet connections faster, broader, and perpetually portable. There will be new terms and ways to connect, collaborate, and share, to add to wikis, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, feeds, steaming video, etc. And it will change, evolve, and grow at speeds we can’t even imagine. A good portion (if not all) of an individual’s life will be online.

But what does this mean for education? I truly don’t see education keeping pace with the speed of technological changes. At least not in the United States. The funding (and the priority) is just not there. And the federal government will provide less and less and the individual states (and local governments) will have to take up more of the burden. On the other hand, this financial impact may change the whole face of public education. We may see many more privatized schools or maybe we will see the merger of local school districts for the sake of financial security. Technology totally set aside, money is definitely a big issue for the future of education.

I’m always an optimist, and definitely am when I think of the future of education, but I do believe that problems we face now, today, in our schools will never be resolved. As new technologies emerge, new problems will always follow. The teachers coming out of college today will be in the education system for the next 30 years. And although these new teachers are entering their classrooms with more technology training than say ten years ago, we still deal with the problem of retraining and good solid professional development as new technology methodologies emerge. So again, technology grows and changes at a very fast pace, but our educational systems lag.

With technology, teaching (and really most occupations) will become a lifestyle rather than a job. People will always be connected, which makes it hard to separate career from personal life. I’ve always felt that teaching has never been a 7 to 3 job. From September to May, teachers immerse themselves in their classrooms and the job never stops. Some of my best lesson ideas have come to me in the middle of the night! With the “World Live Web” and connectivity, I see teaching in the year 2020 as a never-ending constant. In the future, students to students, teachers to students, and teachers to teachers will be ever-connected . . . sharing, collaborating, and doing so in real-time all the time.

Pack your back and take it with you!

Do you carry a backpack? Does it have lots of your life stuff in it? Would you like to convert all that important stuff to a digitally organized, always available, and less heavy format? Then check out backpackit.com. The New York Times, Business Week, PC World and more have really good things to say about it. With over 300,000 people using the site, you can keep your to-do lists, notes, ideas, and calendar online with backpackit. And you can keep it private or share. It’s up to you. The uses of the site are literally endless. But specifically for students this site would be great for

• notetaking
• homework, exam, and project reminders
• compiling resources
• posting club or organization information
• your school and work schedules
• posting your favorites pictures
• keeping track of all your favorites in one spot

You’ll start with a homepage and then add more pages as needed. You can set up lists, notes, and add a writeboard which has RSS capabilities. Save your favorites, keep a calendar, and be totally organized all in one spot. Here’s my backpack example.

Save a tree—practice a paperless classroom

Each school year, I choose a theme for my classroom. It’s usually a general or specific way in which I hope to make a positive change for my school year. One year I hung a large yellow smiley face in the back of my classroom and deemed the year “smile til it hurts.” Another year I decided to be “comfortably numb”—to not allow any bureaucratic educational red-tape paperwork bother me. This year, I began with a vow to eliminate paper usage in my classroom. Now for me, this is a pretty easy task. I teach in a classroom equipped with awesome computers and have a website that I post all lesson plans, assignments, announcements. My students also have access to a dropbox for handing in assignments electronically. And this is the year that I began to facilitate our high school’s first online class using Moodle which eliminates all need for paper. Every activity, assignment, quiz, and wiki is posted electronically and then graded complete with feedback through the site. So I’m good. But I’m also working on those around me. It really irritates me when a whole sheet of paper is used for something that could have been easily formatted on a half sheet thereby cutting down on paper usage by half, but also requiring that someone use a paper cutter. And I’m bugged by memos that come via email and then also on paper copy. Why? And teacher’s who copy mounds and mounds of handouts. Couldn’t at least some of these be distributed electronically? It just takes a little time and creativity. This paperless theme is one that will take me through the rest of my teaching days. It puts more responsibility on the students . . . good thing. It makes learning more fun and interactive for the students . . . good thing. It requires that students network both among themselves and with their teachers . . . good thing. It saves trees . . . awesome concept!

Shifting Classrooms

In Will Richardson’s Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (2006), he outlines ten “Big Shifts” in education. Here’s a link to a slideshare that provides a brief look at each of these shifts.

One of these “Big Shifts” that I practice in my own classroom is Open Content. As Will puts it “Information that used to be found in textbooks is now a Google search away.” As a business technology teacher in a lab of totally up to date computers, I’ve been using “Open Content” for many years. But just recently, I’ve realized this big “shift” in using Moodle open-source course management system. With Moodle, I can pull together blogs, wikis, and podcasts, along with providing my students links to web content. I’ve pretty much eliminated textbooks in my classroom. It’s no longer “open your book to page 37.” I’m not the do all, provide all knowledge disseminator in my classroom anymore. The open world of knowledge is just a click away, and it’s equal responsibility among my students and myself to learn and share knowledge.

Teachers’ Salaries and Standardized Test Scores—Connection?

No Child Left Behind, soon to be entering its sixth year, has played havoc on school districts nation-wide and is wrought with controversial pieces. One piece that hits a nerve with teachers and parents of school aged-children is connecting educator’s salaries with how well their students score on standardized tests. As a teacher, I dread “the week” of standardized tests and know full well that they are not a perfectly true picture of a student’s abilities. As a parent, however, I take a different perspective when analyzing my own children’s “scores.” If my children don’t score at the proficient to advanced level, what was missed in the classroom instruction that may have caused this outcome? Did the teacher not “teach to the test?” Were there not enough homework assignments? Was the material not covered to enough depth? Who’s to blame? Should teachers be held accountable?

NCLB is currently up for reauthorization in Congress with many changes from the original law. Here’s an overview. One of the new stipulations is incentive pay, which dictates that teacher salaries will be contingent upon test scores. Wow, what kind of impact would that stipulation have???

All teachers would flee to the best schools perhaps?
Competition would heat up among colleagues?
Teamwork would diminish?
Focus would be short-term and narrow-minded?
Loyalty to money rather than children?
Teacher quality would improve?

Maybe you have a strong opinion about teacher incentive pay already, and maybe you need to read more. Here are some links to additional reading about teacher incentive pay.

From the Guildordian
From a Sacramento Teacher
From FreeRepublic
From Barack Obama

Looking forward to hearing from you.