It's not even in Hittite!

The Tech Tools in Use Presentation that stands out the most for me was the Padlet one. Padlet seems like it will be the most flexible and useful. I just opened up the one I made in class that day. There it is. Pretty cool I'd say. It is the one thing out of all the Tech Tools in Use presentations that I walked away from with something I could use tomorrow. It's a matching quiz on different kinds of media, from cuneiform tablets to floppy disks. You can make quizzes on Socrative, but I don't think you could make I quiz like this. I for sure couldn't. When I made this I was thinking about a lecture I suggested I to the Senior Humanities team at Huron—teachers of Literature (my mentor), History, and Art. I was thinking about the fragility of knowledge. The seniors have read some Gilgamesh, some Homer, some Virgil (some Plato and Thucydides) and seen and heard about all kinds of buildings, mosaics, statues and pottery. I think as far as the art goes the students have a fair idea what a crap shoot our artistic inheritance from past cultures has been. Mr. Benedict has told them about Goths hacking out faces on the sculptural relief of the Arch of Titus, how arms and legs go missing on classical sculptures, how a few canon balls seemed much preferable to some lost wax Olympian. And so on. But it takes quite a bit more abstraction, I think, to imagine that the raggedy paperback in your hands from the Pioneer book depository was originally a single surviving manuscript. Or a bunch of clay tablets dug up in Iraq from three thousand years ago. That's what I want to talk about. That floppy disc, too. Nobody can read it these days. And not because what's on it is in Hittite. 

Hittite sphinx from Tell Alaf, Syria. Photo: Charles & Josette Lenars/Corbis.

 

I may even use a padlet for my presentation. Why not? I also like the notion of using Padlet as a planning tool. Having all my (virtual) stuff right there in front of me! That way I wouldn't keep loosing stuff.

Chill about Tech

The assignment was called "Tech in My Placement." It meant doing a survey of the teaching and learning technology at your placement school. I'm neutral about what I found, neither surprised nor impressed, not disappointed. There are labs. There are carts. There are document projectors. And so on. I could work with what they have. I'd like to think I could work with whatever technology I find in the school where I'll teach. Because I'll have to. It was interesting to do the survey and see what there was. It's almost like Jeff and Rory kinda want to suggest that we do this at the school where we get our first job. Cosmic!

I found it very interesting to read the responses of the two other MACers at Pioneer: my peers Betsy and Branden. Betsy was depressed. Her disaffection, it seems, had a lot to do with her mentor not having a document camera at the start of school. My mentor did not experience this. If she had, things would have been much different, because this is the one piece of technology always in use in her classroom.

Aside from people liking or not liking the level of technological sophistication at their placements, one of the themes I find from reading others' posts about the Tech in My Placement assignment is the notion that resources are often not exploited fully or properly. Broken, missing equipment. Confusion about how things work. Unused equipment and features. Unreachable IT specialists. This is troubling.

The reason is not hard to find, of course. Grants and budget lines go to buying stuff. Impressive, high-tech, expensive stuff. Spend the money you get for technology, and spend it all, or next year they won't give it because, “the school doesn't need it.” It also means stuff that can be bragged about, “Our school has 50 of this, the latest that, plus some of these, and we're the only school in the district to have one of those.” Looks good on the brochure. Impresses parents who are shopping for a school. Kind of like what's happening these days with colleges, “Come to Fleece U, we have a Michelin four-star dining hall and a rock-climbing wall!”

Then maybe sometimes after the stuff is brought into the school there's not enough money for the people to run, fix, explain and help with the technology. People are expensive for districts. Who needs them! We've got gadgets! Cool gadgets. So there is one IT person, or two. I'd bet they are overworked. I'd bet that is an understatement. And not everyone who is good with technology can maintain patience with a techno-phobe like yours truly. But I'd say that people, the right kind of technology people, are as crucial as the stuff itself. People who can not just fix and troubleshoot, who can deliver equipment and keep it working, but who can talk about features. People with either some imagination about how to use stuff, or the qualities of a salesman.

It's our job as teachers to figure out how to use technology as educational tools, of course. And I wouldn't expect this from IT specialists. What would be nice to see however, is PD about using technology, sharing ideas, having a human talk about all the things you can do with this or that. Especially for teachers who did not have the advantage of such a great Teaching with Technology sequence. (Thanks Jeff and Rory).

Because the level and use of technology in a school does not, I think, entirely depend on just the amount and newness of the technology. It depends also on the level of the people who are able to exploit it effectively for maximal pedagogical effect. And not just one or two teachers. The average level and quality of technology use is probably what most matters in school. What makes the biggest difference.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love SAMR.

Ruben R. Puentedura is the “edu-bloger” behind the SAMR model cited by Tom Ward in class a few weeks ago. SAMR stands for the “levels of technology integration,” going from “'substitution” to “augmentation,” which he classifies at the “enhancement” level, and on to “modification” and finally, “redefinition.” In these last two levels “transformation” is happening. Puentedura talks about using the SAMR model for teaching Macbeth. Here's the pdf for it. If you, dear reader, have looked at this blog at all, you can imagine what my reaction is going to be. But I'm really going to try to be fair and not take any cheap shots. At least not any REALLY cheap shots. No really, read to the end (read Puentedura, too) and then let me know if I have haven't been fair.

Here's what he says about the first level, substitution.

And at this level, a teacher could say well, I'm going to use NoteShare and I'm going to drag and drop different links from the web of which correspond to things like the original text of Macbeth. I could also drag in critical commentary. I could also drag in some books about the Shakespearian stage and finally I could look at YouTube and find some of the classic performances of Macbeth on film and drag those links in. Now this is at the substitution level. What I have here is the equivalent of what we use to do by putting together a library list or a reading list, using paper and using the library. It's very nice that all of these resources are available for free on the net and it's great and very convenient for this list to be available to students with all the links already built in. But it's clear that it is a direct substitution for the traditional form. In other words, at this point, we are using the technology just to substitute for what we would have done before with the library and with a type written list.

OK, this is alright I guess. There's nothing so bad about this. I don't much like the idea of reading anything very long or serious on a screen (which is pretty much everything beyond tweets and FB, especially Shakespeare). Ah, you will say, but it IS Shakespeare's SHORTEST PLAY. That it is, dear reader, that it is... And I especially don't want to encourage this practice in teens. No, wait, it's fine, teens will read Macbeth on their phones... I'm OK with that. Really.

But I'm not even close to embracing SAMR, because all this has been only SUBSTITUTION. Come with me as we move,

[T]o the augmentation level, there's only one very small change that's needed. And that is to add to the list of these resources some materials that do not fall within the scope of what would be in a traditional library. But instead make use of the unique possibilities that the Internet offers as a social environment. So here for instance I've included a link to the Flicker Shakespeare group. So students can see how the people visualize Shakespeare in photos. And these aren't by the way, just photos of straight performances; they're photos that represent different people's artistic approach to Shakespeare.

A link to the Flicker Shakespeare group? We would seem to be valorizing that visual over the verbal. And I don't like that. Shakespeare was all about the verbal. He didn't have any scenery! Go back and read one of his plays or check out a performance. There are SO MANY WORDS! They just TALK AND TALK AND TALK!

Then Puentedura talks about blogs: “blogs allow for more interaction by the students so they can enter into a dialogue with Shakespearian play directors, Shakespearian scholars.” OK, I'm OK with that too. Then we're on to MODIFICATION. In a complex play like Macbeth, he says,  

Meaning is encoded in words and sequences of words. And we now have via sites such as IBM MiniEyes, access to tools that allows us to visualization just that, just those sequences of words, the frequency of word occurrence. So for instance, here are the 100 most frequent words that appear in Macbeth . And if you look at this list closely, you'll find that the word 'blood', which is frequently mentioned in critical analyses are being essential to the meaning of Macbeth , is indeed one of the words that appears frequently. But also note that the word 'time' appears much more frequently as does the word 'fear'. Now this is very interesting because when we look at different stagings of the play, some have chosen to prioritize blood as the running motif, some have chosen to prioritize fear as the running motif. So this is a tool that significantly modifies what the students can do with the material, how they can understand what's going on in Macbeth.

This I think, is one of those “digital humanities” things: use a computer to count words and phrases in a way a human never could in a text and use that to get an insight on the text. Counting words. Really? So we get one of those cool word visualizations with some words bigger (the important ones) and some words smaller... I don't like this because it sounds like a crappy shortcut to reading, pondering, and allowing for inspiration to happen. Who's to say, maybe the most important word in the play occurs only once? One time, fifty times, it's up to YOU, dear reader, not the computer, to decide what to make of a word, a notion, a theme, a feeling...You get these insights when you unplug, not when you let a computer tell you what is important. Turns out, Mindlessness Can Be Just as Productive as Mindfulness). So this approach MIGHT work if you read the play carefully, mull over it, let it speak to you, come up with an idea about it, and then use IBM MiniEyes to support your intuition. Not the other way around.

“We're not talking about getting rid of the traditional analysis,” Puentedura writes. I appreciate this. This one line is the most important sentence I've ever read about SAMR. Yes. IF the ELA teacher remembers what is important and integrates technology to support real, hard-core reading, writing, and thinking.

I'll let you check out what he says for the REDEFINITION level. Here's the link again

(page 5). Quickly, though, because this post is already too long. The Second Life Macbeth Flyover movie has me shaking my head. Watch it and tell me if you think this looks like serious engagement with the play and its ideas. I might show this, as a reward, if students had worked hard and there was measurable learning. But as a student final project? Let's just say for an English class the grade would not be very high. For a computer animation class, on the other hand...

Upstage, however, could be a serious tool, if scaffolded, if used correctly... Yes, I can see it being an important component, even a crucial component of a unit. Using something like this, doing it right, scaffolding for it, making sure it was aligned with a full apparatus of objectives, would be a risky step for a teacher to try. But big rewards come from big risks. Maybe that's how I need to think about SAMR.