Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 2 | Transforming Teaching and Learning Through Technology, page 2

Electronic communication “fundamentally changes relationships in the building,” says Mark Morrison, principal of New Technology High School in Napa, California, a seven-year-old public school initiated, like San Diego’s High Tech High, by educators and the local business community. Rather than creating distance, as one might think, e-mail can help to smooth and democratize school relationships. When three girls needed subsidies to buy $22 tee-shirts for the school’s annual Powder Puff Football game, they e-mailed Morrison, avoiding nosy questions from anyone who would have spotted them walking into his office. In another instance, a shy student e-mailed the principal about a boy who had harassed her. “That little bit of anonymity allowed her to send a message to me that she needed help,” says Morrison.

Creativity improves as well when the community talks in cyberspace. Problem-solving at New Technology High School flourishes on the school’s LotusNotes discussion database, where a secretary proposed banning the e-mail activity announcements that were flooding the system. The school accepted her suggestion to gather them instead into a daily bulletin. Even meetings can become more efficient; New Technology High School staff discussed, on LotusNotes, over several months, whether to change technology standards for students. When staff finally met, they made the decision unanimously in five minutes.

This increasingly familiar power of technology to compress time and space is also changing the teaching and learning of history. Students and teachers who click onto the Library of Congress’ American Memory Project web site— http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amhome.html—can see an early version of the Declaration of Independence with John Adams’ corrections scribbled in the margin, Matthew Brady’s 1,188 Civil War photographs, or a broadside poster offering a bounty for a runaway slave.

Many teachers print out such documents to augment traditional textbooks. But they can also find a model lesson on the site, or assign students to work with documents as historians do, says Michael Federspiel, social studies coordinator for the Midland, Michigan Public schools.

During a unit on the Great Depression, for example, Federspiel—who was team-teaching a four-hour block with English, art and music teachers—had students read The Grapes of Wrath, then illustrate a chosen theme from the book with a collage or PowerPoint presentation of photos. Next, the students formed a hypothesis about what it was like to live in that era, and judged whether the primary sources validated or dispelled it. “We taught them how to search, to narrow down multiple documents to illustrate, say, what a farmstead or highway would look like for tenant farmers,” Federspiel explains. Some students compared the approaches of photographers Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Gordon Parks, asking themselves at the same time, “Are these an accurate record of the times? Was there political motivation in the photographs?”

However, the young historians don’t wander freely in cyberspace. Teachers provide guidance and boundaries. “Confining kids to a single collection helps control the quality of the sites on which they’re working,” says Federspiel. The American Memory Project, he adds, is a “rich and lively” vehicle for teaching the stringent content mandated by standards in Michigan and other states.

Some educators believe that the power unleashed by technology allows students to learn concepts previously thought beyond them. Children who build robots using “programmable bricks”—blocks with tiny computers inside—not only learn about mechanics, but also “work with some engineering concepts related to feedback and control that traditionally have been taught only in universities,” says Mitchel Resnick, associate professor of media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.

A plethora of new software applications facilitates learning by making the abstract concrete. The Geometer’s Sketchpad, for example, allows students to construct geometric shapes on screen and change them with a mouse while preserving the mathematical relationships. Looking quickly at many similar cases helps students understand general principles. Another program, ThinkerTools, lets students adjust settings on the screen so that simulated objects move according to laws of physics. Created to help businesses make decisions by modeling various scenarios, STELLA software helps students understand the dynamics of economic, social or physical systems by modeling situations such as enzyme reactions or highway traffic patterns with sets of interacting equations.

Like STELLA, the simulations used by Classroom, Inc. a nonprofit organization based in New York, trace their origins to the business world. Classroom, Inc. president Madeline E. Lacovara launched the organization in 1991 after consulting for a law firm that—like the founders of New Technology High School and High Tech High—found local high school graduates lacked crucial skills such as critical thinking. Aiming to motivate students intellectually by plunging them into imaginary adult careers, her company created 13 interactive simulations for middle and high school students. In one episode of “The Starr Medical Center: Part I,” for example, students playing the role of an intensive care unit nurse, take vital signs, order tests and write a report to other staff members analyzing the condition of the fictional patient, Hector Rosario, age 51, who has just suffered a massive heart attack. (If the student leaves out an essential point of the analysis, the computer won’t accept it.) In another simulation, “The Alicia Leary Progress Foundation,” students take on the role of executive director of a small foundation and strive to better the lives of the people in their local community.

As students move through the multiple episodes of Classroom, Inc.’s innovative simulations, they learn the science, health education, math, civics and language arts required by national and local academic standards. “A math teacher in New York could look at the content that the state Regents exams will test and see where in the simulation that would be present,” says Lacovara. Solving real-life problems, she adds, keeps kids “on task 98 percent of the time.” To date, Classroom, Inc. has reached over 500 schools and school systems nationwide.

Technology Takes On
Standardized Tests
Teachers often complain that standardized test results come back in the spring or even later, when there’s no chance to address the weaknesses they clarify. Furthermore, the data frequently doesn’t arrive in helpful form. So several school districts around the country are installing new data-management systems that will report students’ skills quickly and in sufficient detail for teachers to tailor their lessons to students’ needs.

That’s what the three-year-old Grow Network is doing for grades four-through-nine in the Chicago and New York City public school systems.“The goal is to provide reports that give you overall scores, scores within instructional topics, and the answer to the question ‘What can I do next?’” explains Benjamin D. Fishman, a professional development leader at the education-oriented company.

While standardized test reports often quantify nebulous categories like “mathematical reasoning” or “critical analysis,” the Grow Network reports on specific, comprehensible categories, says Fishman. So a ninth grade English teacher receives a report based on eighth grade test scores, noting both her incoming class’ overall score, as well as whether they can understand the main idea of a passage, its sequence of events and the author’s purpose. If the teacher wants one student’s scores, she can find them online, similarly categorized.

Next page: Some educators believe that the power unleashed by technology allows students to learn concepts previously thought beyond them.

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