technology

Wait, We Aren’t Connected?

Eduflack BAM, early childhood education, Online Education, Parents, reform, Soul, Students, technology

Based on learning over the past 18 months, one would assume that every household has high-speed internet and every learner has the devices to take advantage of it. But a recent report shows that are digital utopia is the furthest thing from the truth.

Over on the BAM! Radio Network, I sit down with Noggin’s Michael Levine to discuss the realities of connectivity in the United States and what we can and should be doing to address the very real problem.

Give it a listen here – https://www.bamradionetwork.com/track/pipes-and-people-what-the-under-connected-will-need-for-learning-post-pandemic/

Librarians Love Us!

Eduflack 21CS, American history, civics, Online Education, Parents, reform, Social media, Students, teachers, technology

Time for a little not-so-humble brag. As readers know, dear ol’ Eduflack is incredibly proud of my work in transforming the teaching and Learning of American history. I believe this work is essential to both a stronger education snd a stronger society. It’s why I have spent so much time developing the Untold History initiative. And it’s why I launched the Driving Force Institute.

This week, the American Association of School Librarians announced its list of Top Digital Tools. This is an important list, particularly when we consider how just about anyone who is anyone in education was providing digital tools during the last Covid school year.

And Untold History was on that list! I am incredibly proud of what Makematic and I have been able to do here. And I am beyond honored that we have been able to partner with organizations such as the New York Historical Society, American Battlefield Trust, Kentucky Valley Educational Collective, iCivics, and many others to create these important digital tools.

Thank you to all of those who have made this work possible. We are having real impact as we dare mighty things.

A New Ed Department

Eduflack accountability, DeVos, higher ed, Online Education, Presidential campaign, reform, STEM, Students, teachers, technology

“Yes, our educational priorities and needs have shifted over the last decade. Despite these changes, though, we are still focused on important issues such as teacher development, 21st century and STEM skills, education technology, and the P-20 education continuum. How we address these issues and the outcomes we expect from them have changed dramatically, though. A new approach, with new foci, serves as a strong rhetorical tool to make clear that education, edu-investment, edu-transformation, and edu-innovation are central to the rebuilding of our nation. And such rhetoric is all the more important when current economic concerns make it difficult to fund new policy ideas straight out of the gate, a fact that is all too real today.”

From Eduflack’s latest over at Medium, exploring the need for a new structure and new foci at the US Education Department

The Inequity of Learning Pods

Eduflack accountability, BAM, equity, Online Education, Parents, reform, technology, TrumpED

The public discussions of “learning pods” are growing by the week, as desperate families take to social media to find others to pod with and teachers begin to promote their services as a pod “facilitator” in search of a safer, easier to manage learning environment.

But is the future of public education really found in a model where families are spending, in some instances, thousands of dollars more each month to facilitate online learning in the public schools? And do we really want to say the only way hybrid education works is if parents can be prepared to spend more than their current property taxes to insert their children into learning pods?

We explore the issue on the latest episode of TrumpEd on the BAM! Radio Network. Give it a listen here.

For the Next Gen of Teacher Candidates, Content Should be King

Eduflack accountability, higher ed, PD, reform, Teacher Education, teachers, technology

With many public school systems now entering week 10 of their new coronavirus normal, as community school buildings remain shuttered and millions of students try to learn through digital platforms, talk of “the return” to the good ol’ days is growing louder and louder.

Sure, some continue to declare their success in mastering virtual education, but far more are trying to prepare for what traditional school will look like in a traditional environment for the 2020-21 school year. Images of students wearing facemasks and distancing contraptions have already started to fill social media, as educators come to grips with months of lost instruction due to Covid-19, a virtual learning environment offered largely to tread instructional water instead of teaching new content. In response, some are calling for summer school for all to avoid the expected slide from the current to the next school year while others suggest the need to repeat the current grade.

Last week, Chiefs for Change – a group of reform-minded public school superintendents and school administrators – offered a thoughtful report on what school leaders should consider as they look toward the return of a school-building-based instructional year this fall. In The Return: How Should School Leaders Prepare for Reentry and Beyond?, the Chiefs explore a number of important – and controversial – topics, ranging from abandoning the agrarian school calendar (one that currently gives educators and learners summers off) to more “intently focusing on the social and emotional wellbeing and skills of students.”

More interestingly, Chiefs for Change called for school systems across the country to adopt staffing models that focused on educators with deep subject matter and instructional expertise. Yes, this spring’s virtual schooling experiment has demonstrated that the pedagogy and classroom management skills largely taught in colleges of education across the nation do not necessarily translate to teachers successfully managing a virtual classroom on an online platform. For every media story one sees of an elementary school classroom taught via Zoom, with a shared screen that looks like the Brady Bunch on steroids, there are dozens of untold stories of online platforms being used simply as electronic bulletin boards, where teachers simply post assignments for students to collect and complete, providing a thumbs up when any effort is demonstrated by the learner to complete them.

In its recommendations, Chiefs for Change also pulls back a closely-held secret in teacher education. Many teachers are not expert in the content areas they teach. Those who teach U.S. history, for instance, often major in history education, not in American history. The same can be said about those who teach chemistry or biology, the majority of whom leave their teacher education programs with degrees in science education, not in the specific content area. One can even consider the typical elementary school educator, tasked with teaching reading and math and beginning science while equipped with a degree in elementary education that likely provided only some survey courses on a range of content areas, with an emphasis on needed physical classroom management skills.

For years now, reformers have preached about the need to dramatically transform pre-service teacher education. In the early days, the focus was on alternative certification programs and having teacher candidates avoid the “status quo” teachers colleges altogether. More recently, advocates have looked to alternative approaches to traditional teacher education models, with institutions like the Relay/Graduate School of Education becoming the aspirational model.

Decades of research into the most effective approaches to teacher education demonstrate the importance of both strong content knowledge and effective pedagogy. When groups like Chiefs for Change talk about content knowledge, they are essentially noting that novice teachers should be coming to the classroom with a broad and substantial liberal education, one that translates into strong content knowledge of classroom teachers, regardless of the academic subject they are licensed to teach.

A first glance, we may be looking for too much from undergraduate teacher education, expecting all aspiring educators to start as teachers of record with strong, research-based backgrounds in both the subject areas they teach and the most effective ways to teach and lead a classroom. Our new educational normal, though, has clearly demonstrated that the current emphasis on pedagogy and classroom management is woefully insufficient for the uncertain years ahead.

The coming generations of k-12 educators may be digital natives, but they are largely still being prepared in teachers colleges constructed for an analog world. Until their clinical experiences include virtual instruction, and until their preparation focuses on the importance of subject matter content and how to make it interesting, relevant, and understood by all in their classroom, our instructional struggles will continue.

We can do better. We should do better. Ed schools should be committed to preparing world-class educators. School districts should be focused on hiring teachers well prepared in both content and pedagogy, with the assessments to demonstrate their mastery of both. And we all should embrace efforts to ensure our kids’ teachers are truly the best in the world, with the preservice education, in-service supports, and high-quality instructional materials needed for learners to succeed today … and tomorrow.

 

(This piece also appears on Medium.)

Transforming Teacher Education

Eduflack reform, Teacher Education, teachers, technology

“We can’t expect an English teacher to teach without access to literature. We can’t expect a music teacher to teach without employing actual music. We can’t expect a history teacher to teach without a working knowledge of the past. It’s common sense that we provide teachers with the knowledge and tools needed to effectively teach. That means more than just the necessary novel sets or science labs. It also includes a comprehensive preparation program that begins when they first set foot on a college campus and continues until they have become a teacher of record.”

From dear ol’ Eduflack’s latest over at the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper, where I write on the need to overhaul teacher education as we look at our post-coronavirus school needs

What Should Come Next?

Eduflack 21CS, BAM, Online Education, PD, reform, Teacher Education, teachers, technology, TrumpED

Across the nation, schools and educators are doing everything they can to react to the new normal that is our covid society. For most, that has meant shifting to virtual education and trying to deliver existing lesson plans online.

It’s only natural that this past month – and likely the next two or three – will largely be reactive to the current circumstances. It what if were to spend the summer being proactive, using the warmest of months to focus on educator professional development and how best to empower teachers to take full advantage of the new instructional world likely before ya?

https://www.bamradionetwork.com/track/managing-the-evolving-new-normal-reactive-versus-proactive/Dear ol’ Eduflack explores this topic on the latest episode of TrumpEd on the BAM! Radio Network. Give it a listen!

Are We Up to Online Learning?

Eduflack BAM, equity, Online Education, Parents, reform, teachers, technology, TrumpED

This week, tens of millions of students transitioned from traditional classrooms to virtual learning environments. This is the new normal of the coronavirus era.

But with high-speed data deserts and a decade of anti-Common Core parents failing against technology-driven instruction, are we prepared to make the most of this new normal?

We explore the topic on the latest episode of TrumpEd on the BAM! Radio Network. Give it a listen.

Ed Tech is Not the Enemy!

Eduflack BAM, DeVos, reform, teachers, technology, TrumpED

Yes, there are a great many in the education community that look to attack and tear down just about everything that EdSec Betsy DeVos says. So when she starts off 2018 singing the praises of personalized learning, it should be no surprise that the resistance immediately lobbed charges of wanting to turn our schools over to the machines.

This tends to be a common misperception about personalized learning. We’ve bastardized the phase, wanting to believe it means simply plugging every child into a computer and letting the tech do the teaching. And while that might be how some personalized learning is indeed done today, it certainly isn’t what was intended and it certainly doesn’t represent the best of what personalized learning does and can offer, both to the learner and the educator.

At the same time, technology need not be the enemy to learning. Effective personalized instruction isn’t about putting the tablets in charge. At its heart, it is about providing educators with a tool that can be used to effectively reach some of their students. In the hands of a great teacher, technology can be empowering, not limiting. And yes, it can improve the learning process.

Over at BAM! Radio Network, I explore the topic, praising personalized learning and asking us to cut ed tech a break when it comes to the classroom. Give it a listen.

And for those who say personalized learning is just a tool of the technology companies and doesn’t actually work, give a look over to special education programs and IEPs. An IEP is just personalized learning in a different wrapper, folks.

Making Our Schools Connected Again

Eduflack BAM, DeVos, technology, TrumpED

Last month, educators across the country rightly fretted over the potential impact of net neutrality and what it would mean for the use of the Internet in classrooms across the country. After all, who wants corporate providers determining which websites are more appropriate – and thus faster to load – than others in our schools?

Before we rally to the barricades to take on the FCC, perhaps we need to take a closer look at the e-rate and connectivity in general in our schools. While most of us have become used to having immediate access to anything on the inter webs from the palm of our hands, no matter where we are, recent data has shown thousands of schools across the country are still lacking the basic connectivity that the e-rate had originally promised them, and many of those school districts in need were denied needed connectivity dollars by the Obama Administration, not the Trump’s.

On the latest episode of #TrumpEd on the BAM! Radio Network, we explore this subject, trying to refocus the education community on the most pressing need first. Give it a listen!