China's crime crackdown or censorship?

This piece from BBC.com helps explain some of my current reality as an educator trying to find ways to utilize Web 2.0 tools effectively in my classroom. The article, "China arrests thousands in latest Internet crime crackdown", describes efforts by the Chinese government to suppress cyber crime; but it is unclear as to whether this is about cracking down on things like busting porn sites, and sites selling information illegally online or whether this latest crackdown is another excuse to initiate further censorship.

This is why that as long as I'm teaching in China, many of the tools we are using and learning about in this class will be unavailable to me and my students (I've written some about this topic in the past). This is just another entry on the lengthening list of reasons that we will probably not stay in China after the 2012 - 2013 school year; it's just getting to be too much of a hassle.

And by the way, I'm posting this from China now - Swiss holiday is over :-( So if you don't hear anything else from me, I've probably been scooped up in this latest effort to censor "harmful" writings on the web in China.

The article, "Backwards Planning Takes Time", by Rebecca Alber from Edutopia, served to reinforce several ideas that I'm sure we're all familiar with, the main one for be being that your summative assessments have to be guided and informed by the standards and/or learning objectives you want to assess. This is not groundbreaking educational insight, but this short piece did get me thinking about the ways in which many teachers use technology in their practice.

I see some of my colleagues jumping on this, that, or the other technology bandwagon, all fired up and ready to start using some cool technology in their classrooms. The thing is, they're not linking it to any standards or objectives; they just see something that looks cool or interesting and throw that at their students because they feel like or hope) it will make the topic more fun or engaging. My experience is that kids can sniff out this kind of pointless assignment a mile away, technology based or not. And while it may be fun or interesting for the students to use a new form of technology, they will quickly see that the assignment has no real point and lose interest. One thing that I have learned thus far in this master's program is that if teachers plan to really use technology in meaningful and engaging ways, they must plan for it just as they would any other lesson, project, activity, or assessment. This is done not by throwing in a cool technology project just for the fun of it, but by carefully assessing what kinds of technology-based instruction will best help the students meet the learning goals and objectives. In some cases, technology use my not always be the best solution, so we have to careful about using all of the tools that modern educators have available.

And remember, even though it would be nice to be seen as the "fun, cool" teacher who lets their students engage in a lot of technology use, the kids will become disenchanted if they're not really learning anything from it.

Some surprising truths about multitasking

I first  got started reading about multitasking this morning with this article from the Huffington Post's technology page. Author Daniel Guloti writes about the debilitating effects of multitasking - not on the multitaskers themselves, but on the people around them. While this was mildly interesting, the more fascinating stuff came from the sources Guloti cited in support of his article.

So I followed some of those links and read more about multitasking and its effects on people's brains. One study showed that less than 3% of the population can actually multitask effectively; the researchers were unable to identify what factors separated these individuals. Other research indicated that multitasking led to reduced productivity, increased stress, and led to as much as a 10% drop in IQ while multitasking - this from the Harvard Business Review.

But the article that I found most interesting is from Mail Online, entitled "Is multi-tasking bad for your brain?", by John Naish. Naish cites several sources, including MIT neuroscientists, the Journal of Experimental Psychology, and behavioral and clinical psychologists, who all warn that not only is multitasking not really possible for most people, it is actually harmful.

The article also debunks a couple of myths about multitasking. The first is that women are better at it; the research does not support this. The second untrue myth, and far more important for educators, is that young people who are growing up as multitaskers are better at it, that their brains are being "rewired" for multitasking, and that it's a good thing. Not so, according to Naish. The research cited in the article indicates that:

• the more time students spend on multitasking the harder time they have focusing on a single intellectual task, like reading a book.
• studying while multitasking sends information to parts of the brain where it is difficult to retrieve.
• humans are not built to think this way - we're built to focus.
• multitasking is actually bad for a child's intellectual development.
• children who spend their formative years multitasking lose out on forming interpersonal skills.
• multitasking can rob people of self-awareness and creativity.

So think again if you really believe that the 21st century is all about multitasking, and kids being able to do several things at the same time in your classroom. A lot of the research out there says it isn't so, and that's enough for me to question, research further, and to find out what the truth really is. But as with most research done in trying to understand the human brain and how it works, there are rarely clear-cut answers.

Why arts education is important

People ask me all of the time about the differences in being a band director and a math teacher. My answers usually have two common threads. People treat me with much more respect and assume that I am much smarter now that I'm a math teacher, not a band director; and I work a lot less as a math teacher than I ever did as a band director. Most people are also surprised by these answers, but they are the truth, at least for me.

But the main thing that is true for me as a math teacher is that I no longer have to justify what I teach as being important; everyone thinks math is an essential, but few people truly feel that music education is critical to having a good school. Oh, yes, every administrator I've ever had has told me how important music is, but when it comes right down to it, music and other arts programs are the first to be cut when school budgets fall on hard times. My wife, who teaches instrumental music, is facing this issue yet again in our current school. That's why she's pursuing a degree to become a certified school counselor - she's had enough of having to constantly defend what she does as an educator. She's damn good at what she does, by the way...

That's why I found this video posted on Edutopia to be a refreshing breath of air. The music educators on the video explain the importance of music in their students' lives. The big buzz in education these days is "social constructivism", and I can say that a band rehearsal (or any performing ensemble rehearsal, for that matter) is nothing but non-stop social constructivism in action. So I was doing what the experts' consensus of "best practice" in education currently is way back in 1985, and ensemble conductors and teachers were practicing it for decades before that.

I could go on for quite some length here and bore you with my harangue on advocacy for music and arts education. Watch the video instead.

Professional development is essential in technology integration

While I really don't want to seem like I keep harping on the same topics in this blog, it seems like several topics keep on popping up in my weekly reading. Kathy Baron's article "Professional Development Adds Up for Maine's Math Teachers", from Edutopia, cites a two-year study that "examined the impact of high quality ongoing professional development" conducted with middle school math classes in Maine.

The researchers identified what "high quality" professional development entails, and the list reproduced in the article is very interesting. One of the items on the list that stood out for me was that effective technology PD begins with learning and content goals, and effective teaching methods, and not with technology. So what I'm reading over and over is that using technology in education is way more effective if it is accompanied by appropriate support, training, and professional development. 

Reiterating what I've posted previously: schools can have all the latest, coolest technology, lots of toys and gadgets for teachers students to use and experiment with, and state-of-the-art hardware and software - but without showing teachers how to effectively utilize all of that amazing technology, it's not going to be nearly as cool as it could be.

Can e-readers replace textbooks?

In reading the article "Start Your Back-to-School Shopping With These Tools" from Ed Tech, the one item that stood out for me was using the Kindle Fire as a way to start replacing books in schools. This makes a lot of sense to me, especially in my current teaching situation in an international school in China. Since our language of instruction is English, all textbooks must be ordered from outside of China. I won't go into all of the gory details, but this is an extreme hassle, as I've found out since becoming the mathematics chair and being responsible for ordering all educational materials for the department.

The pilot program described in this article, also from Ed Tech, was to use funds budgeted for textbooks to purchase 100 Kindle Fire tablets for student use. E-books are much less expensive, and some publishers allow deployment of e-books to five Kindles, while others have no limitations. So for my school, we could save a ton of money on shipping costs alone, to say nothing of the import duties and screening of our educational materials by the PRC government. My wife, who teaches music, goes through all kinds of hassles since only "approved" music can be imported into China. Plus, all of our educational resources must be purchased through a special government agent. So even if we had to pay the same price for an e-book as we currently pay for the paper textbook, we still save a lot of money, time, and frustration. I'm not sure what direction educational publishers are going with making more of their material available as e-books, but I think it is something that cannot be ignored.

This is something that I will be suggesting to our administration for future exploration. The books for all of my classes are on CD, so I have been in a paperless textbook environment for the past seven years. The kids have no problems with it, and in fact most of them prefer reading their books on their device of choice rather than using a "regular" book. For the upcoming school year, our math department will only be issuing hard copy textbooks to those students who request one. I believe this will be the way of the future, and the traditional textbook will become a vanishing commodity.

Another look at iPads

I'm not trying to stick to a theme this week, but Ben Johnson's article "How the iPad Can Transform Classroom Learning" from Edutopia reiterates some common themes in the articles I 've been reading lately. Johnson points out that one of the keys to making student use of technology in the classroom work is that it must be planned and directed by the teacher. He points out that if the students are actively engaged in an authentic and genuinely interesting problem-solving using technology, then the temptation to use their devices inappropriately during class will be greatly diminished or eliminated.

So it seems to me that having the students making full use of the technology at their fingertips in the classroom takes careful planning, monitoring and direction from the teacher so that the kids aren't off task. It can't become a free-for-all with students randomly using their technology for whatever they feel like during class. This means that we as the educational leaders in the classroom must make certain that we plan activities, projects, and learning environments that are technology friendly for our digital natives, but that always have an educational goal and/or learning outcome at their core.

I know for me that this will take some time and careful consideration. One example for a math class that Johnson gives in his article has the teacher saying, "OK class take out your iPads and find the best geometric form for a deep sea submarine." Maybe a good foundation for the start of the lesson, but the teacher also better outline goals and objectives of the activity, give the students clear criteria as to what their answers must include, and closely monitor their activity and progress. Otherwise, you end up with a room full of students aimlessly surfing the net - and without a clearly defined goal, it will be easy for them to get off track.