Byting the Apple |
The trials and tribulations of the tech guy (Dan) for a few middle schools, and a high school English teacher (Erin) in Denver, CO. Contact us @bytingtheapple |
They don’t make tech directors sharper than Lynzi Ziegenhagen at ASPIRE. This article is a must-read (as is her entire SchoolZilla blog).
If you’re inclined to follow her advice and working on technology for a school, my CMO is hiring as well!
New tech for the classroom starts and ends with implementation. As a teacher and tech enthusiast, I love trying out new products to see how they work in my class, and if they can make my staggeringly challenging work a little bit easier. I will periodically post reviews of the tech I’m trying in my class, along with observations about how it worked.
The first app that I want to talk about is Class Dojo. This was recommended to me by a veteran teacher in my building, but I’ve also heard some buzz about it in Startup Weekend EDU circles (apparently the Class Dojo founders met at the event a few years ago). Technically, it’s designed for elementary/early middle school teachers to track and award (or take away) points transparently and in real time for classroom behavior, but the fields are customizable for just about anything. I opted to use it to track responses in discussion for Socratic seminar in my English class. It. Was. AMAZING. The kids responded so well to receiving feedback immediately and having that feedback visible to the entire class. It also made my life incredibly easy not to have to grade written work every single day, but instead have daily grades for discussion available in my browser. Happy kids, happy teacher…mega points in the Win column.
Here’s how I’d break it down (points awarded out of 5)
Design/Interface: 4. UI is clean and intuitive, and the graphics are cute. The little monster icons for each student were a little juvenile for my taste, but the kids liked them (seniors are SO WEIRD.)
User Friendliness: 5. Very easy to learn and use almost immediately.
Time-Saving: 5. For the reasons I listed above, this thing was a godsend.
Overall: 4.5. Fabulous.
-Erin
As a current Teach for America corps member, the achievement gap is rarely off my radar these days. However, I always have to catch myself when I name-check the widely observed phenomenon of low-income students of color falling behind their more affluent, white and Asian peers in academic performance to people who have no idea that this is even a thing.
“So what’s the solution?” people like my dad ask me when we’re talking about this stuff. “Is it the parents? Teachers? The kids themselves?”
Anybody who follows this issue will tell you, yes, and no, to all. It’s a complicated pastiche of factors that some of the best minds in education are trying to unravel.
But that’s not specifically what I want to talk about.
I wanted to throw my two cents into the debate in terms of tech—that, in addition to the achievement gap being made up of many things (literacy, math skills, socioemotional issues, I could go on…) the achievement gap is also comprised of an extremely unequal distribution of tech skills, knowledge, interest, and resources.
A lot of people, myself included, view educational inequity as a civil rights issue. It absolutely is—maybe not one that is as intentionally perpetuated by the institution as Jim Crow or segregation was, but one that is every bit as detrimental to communities across the country. Bad schools are keeping illiterate and poor communities illiterate and poor, and the communities centered around these schools suffer with them. I would argue that explicitly teaching the kinds of basic technical skills necessary to hold a job and survive in the 21st century is just as much a mandate as getting kids up to grade level in reading.
Many reports have said that the economy is growing, and that more jobs have been created for Americans. I’ll give you one guess as to which industry most of those jobs are in. It’s definitely not manufacturing or unskilled labor. What concerns me is that kids going to school in low-income neighborhoods don’t have access to the necessary basics early on to even have a fair shake at landing any of these new jobs in tech because so many of these schools are woefully behind in preparing kids to function in an increasingly tech-savvy economy.
At the school where I work, we preach and push for success in college, careers, and in life. However, the vast majority of my students don’t know how to type and format a college-style research paper, use an online library database for research, or send a business email. How will these kids—they’re seniors now—survive in college if they’re hurting for these skills when they get there? At that point, it will be too late, and they will already be far behind their more affluent peers in not only reading and math skills, but in basic technical knowledge as well. Never mind that many American companies outsource much of their tech and engineering work overseas…if kids in our poorest communities can’t even get a leg up for jobs available in the U.S., then we seriously need to reevaluate what it means to close the achievement gap.
-Erin
I love learning about EdTech. I love seeing what smart, technically adept people come up with to solve problems in the classroom. I love that smart, technically adept people are even working on solutions to help those of us in the classroom solve our problems, because it gets lonely in there sometimes (I could probably rant for days about how innovation in the education field is stunted by the isolating nature of the current school structure…another time, perhaps.) I love seeing what EdTech people come up with, but at the same time, I always find myself having that moment where I’m thinking “Seriously? I can actually not think of a way I would use that. Did they even talk to a real teacher? Like, in a real classroom? Because that math lessons through Twitter/FarmVille but in a classroom/detention FourSquare thing sounds completely insane.” (Actually, detention FourSquare would be kind of awesome.)
My name is Erin, and I am a high school English teacher. I don’t pretend to be the most tech-savvy person in my field (I majored in POETRY) but I spend a lot of my time thinking about education and technology, and how the two can have a happy and functional relationship. I like to think that a solid grounding in technology is the shot in the arm that the American education system needs to be innovative and interesting again, and I get scared wondering if dusty, outdated labs full of computers still running Windows 2000 is really the best the average teacher can hope for.
I will be contributing my thoughts on EdTech here, hoping to expand the dialogue to the implementation end. I’ll post product reviews of the apps that I use in my own classroom, observations from my own experience with tech in teaching, and the occasional problem that some enterprising startup needs to solve for me.
Now, to use my favorite loaded phrase in teaching: What questions do you have?
-Erin
I’ve spent a lot of time constructively complaining over the past six months:
I did my best to understand things from the perspective of the person I was complaining to (putting on my “consulting hat”), and make suggestions that were reasonable and actionable. I expected this kind of constructive complaining to both make me feel better and to result in improved service. It has done none of these things.
Resolving to complain (rather than ignore) things that aren’t working well has made me so much more aware of all of the inefficiencies and problems I run into daily. While there may be some benefits to this increased awareness, the primary result is that I’m increasingly angry and frustrated.
And while complaining can be useful in some cases (i.e. asking airlines for compensation), in most cases it’s impossible to speak to a person who can actually resolve an issue, or to convince them that the issue is worth solving (startups are an exception to this rule).
What I’ve learned from my time complaining constructively is that the real answer is to “complain” proactively. I’m resolving never to sign a contract that doesn’t contain a meaningful SLA and dispute resolution mechanism. I’ll “complain” with my feet and fire companies who don’t care about improvement. And I’ll rarely complain to a company that can’t (or won’t) compensate me adequately for my time and effort.
Conditions for rain:
Conditions for edutech innovation:
Me pitching: “Your Kid’s a Jerk”
Finally got the EduTech meetup started! Huge thanks to Meredith Ely at LearnBoost for helping me “franchise” the SF group!
Next step, updating this blog more frequently!
This morning posed an interesting challenge.
The Case: Our Lake campus received 4 new Cisco wireless access points this summer. I helped them get two set up on the 3rd floor, and two set up on their ground floor. Recently, wireless has been spotty on the 3rd floor, causing us to check the access points. One of the 3rd floor WAPs was missing!
The Hunt: While our first assumption was thievery (or mischief), I wanted to be sure before we started a hunt. As it turns out, our IT folks showed all four WAPs reporting to their N-Able server. And I could access the web interfaces for all four devices. So… where was the missing access point?
The Solution: I downloaded a copy of inSSIDer and went on a hunt. Using process of elimination and their time graph, I figured out the MAC address of the missing switch. From there, I played a WiFi version of “Marco Polo” until I found its general location. The Cisco management console also told me who was connected to that AP. Students were in classrooms, so I couldn’t go on and grab the moved WAP - but I’m confident we have enough information now to track it down.
The Better Solution: Better labeling and documentation of the installed WAPs would have saved me some time identifying which WAP went missing. I’m guessing that a smarter switch could have helped me determine which Ethernet jack the missing WAP ended up plugged into, which could have been helpful if we had a networking diagram!
