My Educational Technology Christmas List

It's the time of year when children are adding their final items to their Christmas list and making the trek to the local mall to tell the Jolly Old Elf what tops their list for Christmas. Keeping in that spirit, here is my educational technology wish list, in no particular order:

• Apple to get their 'stuff' together to make iPads / iPods more compatible with school environments - we want to be able to volume license apps for classroom sets, we want iTunes to work better in an enterprise environment, we want true educational discounts, etc.
• more bandwidth - enough said!
• more new Google features - seems like there are always new things making life better for Google users in schools (my last discovery was Google CloudPrint).
• a stable Student Information System with clean data.
• lower prices for assistive technology - I know that it is a somewhat limited market, but come on, these are the students who need it the most!
• teachers to understand that mindless Internet games are a not a good use of divisional resources.
• devices for all students - for every student to have a personal device under their tree this Christmas and to be able to bring it to school.
• fewer computer labs in the schools - more use of wireless computers / devices when needed, in the classrooms.
• full time help desk - we can always use more help!
• video conferencing capabilities in all schools.
• quality Internet access at home for all students, allowing them to leverage the tools that they are using at school.
• more tech innovators who 'get it', when it comes to education.

What would you add to this list?

Shifting Roles in the 21st Century

The 2010 special report, A Vision for 21st Century Education, by the Premier's Technology Council of British Columbia highlights what is needed for school systems to transform in order to properly serve the citizens of today's knowledge-based society. Although there are a number of very interesting and thoughtful areas discussed in the report, the one that resonated with me the most was the section on shifting roles.

The report discussed the shift that is currently happening and what needs to further shift regarding the roles of the three main stakeholders in education: students, teachers and parents. It suggests that students need to continue to evolve from that of a passive student to an active learner, taking responsibility and ownership for much of their own learning.  This includes both formal and informal learning. Technology affords this in many ways for students, allowing them access to information at almost any time from almost anywhere. In fact, according to a 2007 Cisco study, school was the place where youth were the most disconnected from technology.

The argument is made that not only are these students capable of using the technology in their learning, but are likely eager to integrate it into their own learning.

The role of the teacher moving from a lecturer to a guide is well underway in many of today's classrooms. Unfortunately, this is more often the case in elementary classrooms than in secondary classrooms. There are a myriad of reasons for this, including the intensity of the curriculum, diploma examinations and university applications to name a few. In my opinion, these are just excuses and the reasons more often lie with the teachers' inabilities to adjust their own teaching. This isn't always a result of a poor teacher. Sometimes, a teacher may be passionate about the subject material and they feel that the best way to get that passion across to their students is to lecture them on the topics. Often, the curriculum itself is one of the main culprits. As new curricula is being developed and rolled out, there becomes less of a focus on specific knowledge and more focus on skills and understandings of concepts. Technology plays a part in this role transformation by providing teachers more tools to help students learn and to differentiate their learning to the benefit of all students. The role of the teacher focuses less on direction and instruction and more on the learning coach or guide.

However, the one that stood out as being a bit different from much of the other literature is that of the changing role of the parent. The Premier's Technology Council points out that parents are (and need to continue) moving from strictly supporters of their child's education to an active participant in it. Technology allows for greater access to information about their child's attendance, assignments, and progress. Whether this be through online portals of the school division's school information system (SIS) or simply through email contact with their child's teacher. When I was teaching in the classroom five years ago, I saw firsthand the impact that email contact with parents could have, as it is quick and non-intrusive. The role of parents outside of the school walls is also recognized, as students are only in school for a portion of the time and learning can occur anywhere and at anytime.

As leaders, we need to embrace these changing roles in our own systems and encourage and support our stakeholders so that they can begin to make this shift or move further to completing this shift.

Of these three shifting roles, which do you see as the most difficult one to make? Why?

Cisco Systems Inc. (2007). Equipping every learner for the 21st century. Retreived Oct. 8, 2011 from http://www.cisco.com/web/about/citizenship/socio-economic/docs/GlobalEdWP.pdf.

Premier's Technology Council. (2010). A vision for 21st century education. Vancouver, BC: Premier's Technology Council.

School Leadership in the 21st Century

The role of administration in schools is changing, as students and schools themselves are changing. It was not too long ago, that the role of school administrator was primarily a managerial job, in charge of the day to day business of the school. The principal was in charge of the school’s budget, discipline and the hiring of teachers an other staff. Although this is still a part of the position, it has become a small part, with a more important focus being that of an instructional leader. This alone is not entirely new, as Stonge wrote in 1993 about the role of administrator is that of an educational leader, a combination of manager and instructional leader. What is changing, however, is what an instructional leader looks like, in a 21st century school.


What is important to understand is that the majority of our schools, although they are all in the 21st century, have not adopted the principles of 21st century teaching, as outlined by Friesen & Lock (2010). A 21st century leader combines the skills and competencies of 21st century learning with digital technologies. Either of these alone is not effective to be an educational leader with today’s students. As a leader, administrators must model and encourage (for both their teachers and their students) such things as creativity, collaboration and ethical citizenship. They must foster and use effective assessment techniques. They must build and maintain structures (both physical and the way classes are set up) that not only allow for but encourage teaching and learning to follow 21st century competencies.


This is a difficult feat in the current situation in Alberta schools. The economic situation is causing teacher layoffs and larger class sizes, yet the demands are being put on the principal to give students greater access to digital technologies, often requiring heavy investments. Adding to this, is the mindshift that is required by teachers to change the way that they are teaching (or how their students are learning) and for parents to accept that this shift from the way that they were taught and are familiar with (“It worked for me, why change it?”) is okay and better for their children, as they learn differently than their parents.


Regardless of the obstacles that make this difficult, as school leaders, we owe it to our students to lead our schools in their transformations to 21st century schools.

Friesen, S., & Lock, J. (2010). High Performing Districts in the Application of 21st Century Learning Technologies. Edmonton, AB. College of Alberta School Superintendents.
Stronge, J.H. (1993). Defining the principalship: Instructional leader or middle manager?NASSP Bulletin, 77(553), 1-7

An Apology to My Former Students or What I've Learned About Assessment

Everyone experiences growth through their chosen profession. As teachers, we are constantly exposed to learning, both of our students and our own. I have been very fortunate to have given an enormous amount of professional learning opportunities in my career, especially over the past five years in my out-of-classroom positions. When I return to the classroom, whenever that may be, there will certainly be many changes in what I do, in all areas, including instruction and assessment. When I think back on some of my former practices, I realize that what I was doing was not the best for students. It was not done out of malice, simply just out of a lack of understanding. What I offer here is an apology to those students with whom I could have done a better job of assessment.

• I'm sorry for thinking that if I let you know what the outcome of the lesson was, it would 'ruin the surprise'. I now know that students can better learn if they know what they are learning about.
• I'm sorry for giving too many summative assesements each term - I now realize that I do not require so many marks, just to make 'the program' calculate the mark correctly.
• I'm sorry that I never really understood how my gradebook program calculated your marks. With a good understanding, rather than having it set up by task type, it would have much more to do with objectives.
• I'm sorry that I gave out punitive grades - zeros, deductions for handing assignments in late, not allowing rewrites or extra time on tests. Rather than using assessment to measure how much you understood (so that I could help you understand the parts that you didn't), I was focused on getting a mark on how prepared you were or for your behaviour.
• I'm sorry that I gave out bonus marks - it's not a true measurement of learning, when I ask you a random question as a bonus mark on an exam (even if we had fun with it).
• I'm sorry that my assessment practices made it difficult for you to improve your mark, if you had a few poor marks at the beginning of the year or semester. Your final mark should have been more indicative of what you actually knew and learned by the end of the year.
• I'm sorry that I ever had you fill in a bubble sheet multiple choice exam, even though I tried to write higher-level questions.
• I'm sorry that sometimes your behaviour was linked to your academic mark. What was a 'citizenship' mark and what did it have to do with your understanding of the program of studies and outcomes. How is 'effort' on assignments measured - what was I thinking?
• I'm sorry that in my efforts to maintain 'fair' grading processes, I was actually doing quite the opposite.

Please accept my apology and for those of you who are now teachers yourself, please learn from my mistakes.

Book of Awesome - Back to School

I've been a big fan of Neil Pasricha's 1000 Awesome Things and the accompanying Book of Awesome books for quite some time. Here in Canada, we are just getting back into the swing of things and the new school year is starting. While driving home from holidays, my wife (who is also a teacher) and I were discussing back to school and the excitement of it. Now that I have been out of the classroom for a few years, I really miss being a classroom teacher on the first day of school. However, I do get to experience this from a different angle, as a parent of children going into grades 2 & 5.

So, we developed this list of what is awesome about getting back to school:

• New Stuff - For many students, back to school means all kinds of new things - new clothes, new shoes, new backpack and new school supplies. For me, I remember very clearly being excited about getting to pick out my new lunch kit for the year. Some of my most memorable ones include Wayne Gretzky, NHL, Smurfs and PacMan. For those who like organizing, it's a great time, labeling those new supplies, finding homes for all of your new stuff, setting up your locker / desk (or classroom for those who become teachers).
• Catching Up With Friends - Summer is a busy time and despite having more time off, it can be difficult to catch up with friends (this is true for both students and teachers). That first day back may be the first time you have seen your classmates for close to two months. For myself, I grew up on a farm and my nearest friend lived about 10 miles away, which meant it was rare to get together in the summer.
• Classrooms - As a teacher, it is a lot of work, but once you have your room set up for that first day, you can step back, look at the bulletin boards, the configuration of desks / tables, the reading corner, etc. and be proud. When the students enter in the morning, take a look at their faces. It's worth the work - they think that it is awesome.
• Shiny School Floors - Walking into the school and seeing the glare of lights off of the newly waxed floors, one realizes the amount of work that custodians have put in over the summer and that once school starts, the floors will not look like that until the next summer. Just maybe, you might catch one of us teachers running and sliding down the hallway before the start of school.
• Smiles - Despite the nervousness and the fact that they are back in school, nothing beats the big smiles that greet you when students walk into your classroom for the first time.
• Stories - Every kid has a story to tell you about the summer. Some are good, some are bad and some are just plain strange, but regardless, they can't wait to tell their story. Kids have the most awesome stories.
• The End of Day 1 - Once the room empties out at the end of the first day of school, as you collapse into your chair from exhaustion, you are grinning from ear to ear, thinking about how awesome the first day is.

What makes the first day of school awesome for you?

Incremental vs Conceptual Change

I recently heard Mary Cullinane give a keynote address at the Learning Forward Summer Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. One of her key points that stuck with me was regarding change in the education system. She used the example of ATMs to illustrate the difference between incremental and conceptual innovation. The implementation of ATMs was a conceptual change from tellers, whereas the change to deposit a cheque without having to input information into the ATM is an incremental change. It is different, but it is more of a slight process change, it doesn’t require a whole different mindset. If you understand the solution, it is incremental. If you understand the problem, it is conceptual.

Most of the change that has occurred in education in the past few decades has been incremental, where there has been tweaking and other changes, but it more or less is the same as it was fifty years ago (at least as a generalization). Students are in desks, usually in rows and most of the learning is teacher directed, especially for upper elementary and higher. Although most of these changes have been good, they haven't really been enough, based on how different the students that we see in our classrooms today are. What we need to happen is conceptual change. For this, we need a better understanding of the problems in education. This is not an easy task, it is a huge undertaking, but if we want to make a real difference, that is what needs to be done.

Some of the necessary conditions that Cullinane outlined are:

·        People maintain a tight connection between new technology and education value.

·        People aren’t bound by the traditional constraints of their industry or market, encourage innovation.

·        People don’t face career destruction if an idea fails; it cannot be a punitive environment.

·        People should have clear and direct incentives for success.

What resonated with me the most was the idea that people should feel safe to make educated mistakes.  If we don’t allow this, people will not take responsible risks, which is how we can get further down the road to conceptual change in education.

Based on the keynote presentation at Learning Forward 2011, by Mary Cullinane - July 19, 2011 - Indianapolis, Indiana

Focus on Professional Learning

Many of us educators have been in a professional development session, either as a participant or a presenter, only to hear the comment from another participant that "we had this last year". As an system, educators are constantly looking for and expecting the latest and greatest idea in education, sometimes at the expense of other, current initiatives, programs or ideas. Why is this so often accepted in our profession, when it would be scoffed at in so many others? Can you imagine a professional athlete telling their coach that they did these drills / exercises the year before or a doctor saying that they learned about cataract surgeries two years ago, so they don't need any more about it? Despite the fact that we have the understanding that 'drill and kill' is a terrible thing for our students, it has been shown countless times that skills are developed with deliberate practice. Think of the  concert pianist, elite athlete or current music star and you can imagine the hours of practice that each of these individuals did to hone their skills.

I'm not advocating for drill and kill as a way for students to learn the curriculum, however, it is to illustrate the importance of focus for professional development. Ainsworth's (2003) work with teachers and administrators in improving assessments found that years of practice on the same area of focus in professional learning yielded vastly superior professional work and student results. The more focus, the better the results. If one's focus is spread over too many areas, the results are also diffused. I for one, can say that my classroom lessons and assessments, as well as discipline improved as I practiced more. In fact, I wish I could apologize to the students that I taught in my first few years of teaching, when I look back on how much I have improved as an educator.

Educators should not use this concept as a crutch to hold onto something that research shows as unsuccessful, but to grasp this concept for their own professional development or growth plans and understand that it is not only permitted, but should be encouraged to have the same focus from year to year.

Ainsworth, L. (2003). "Unwrapping" the standards: A simple process to make standards manageable. Englewood, CO. Advanced Learning Press.
Reeves, D. (2010). Transforming professional development into student results. Alexandria, VA. ASCD