Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 2 | Transforming Teaching and Learning Through Technology (low bandwidth)

Fourteen year-old Will Gomez leans back on his chair, stretching away from the black-framed computer screen in front of him. He wears a blue oxford cloth shirt and khakis, and his light brown hair is gelled up into spikey peaks.

“Does anyone have a bunch of golf balls?” he tosses out toward the backs of the 20 other students in his physics classroom at San Diego’s High Tech High, who are also seated at computer screens ranged around three of the four classroom walls. “I want to find out how many golf balls will fit into a cubic foot,” he says. “You know the little spaces between golf balls? I have to figure that out, too. My question is,” Gomez continues, swiveling around on his chair to face the center of the room, “how many golf balls will fit into the interior space of a football stadium?”

“If you convert the volume of the stadium into cubic inches, you would divide that by the volume of the golf ball,” answers Steve James, a tall slim boy with black hair combed back smoothly over his skull. Striking in his black shirt with large red and white Hawaiian flowers, James jumps up from his own computer screen and wheels around on black running shoes to face Gomez. “Well, okay, where’s a pencil?”

The two teenagers bend over a piece of paper on a table, James talking excitedly as he sketches and scribbles formulas and calculations, Gomez watching.

This bit of spontaneous theater and noisy problem solving, one of several conversations rumbling sporadically through the room, might disturb a teacher in a traditional classroom, but it’s fine at High Tech High, a charter school in the San Diego Unified School District that puts a premium on collaborative problem solving and creative thinking. Gomez will have two weeks to design and present to his physics class his poster about a “Fermi problem,” which, he explains, means figuring out, “how many of something would relate to something else.”

This poster assignment aims to sharpen his students’ “real world critical thinking skills,” says High Tech High physics teacher Jared Schiffman. It’s much more motivating, he adds, than the farfetched word problems in traditional textbooks like, “If Sally is twelve years older than Jon, and Jon is eight years younger than Jeff, how old is Sally?”

Students will use PowerPoint software to explain their Fermi problems, applying design principles that Schiffman—who has a masters degree in media arts and sciences from MIT—has just taught them. (Schiffman: “What is another design principle?” “Organization!” cry several students. Schiffman: “Yes, divide space carefully.”)

A wiry, energetic 29-year-old with uncombed puffs of curly blond hair on either side of his head, a strong clear voice and blue eyes framed by black wire-rimmed glasses, Schiffman proudly describes another recently completed class project. “I showed them how to do basic simulation of projectile motion, and they made a game around it, using Flash software,” he explains.

Such assignments illustrate the heady potential for technology to fire up kids’ desire to learn. Indeed, says Schiffman, these projects are so appealing that he saves them for the end of class. “It’s almost like candy,” he explains. “It’s always, ‘Can we work on our projects now?’ They’re just really excited to do it.”

Schiffman’s Fermi problem poster and Flash project assignments illustrate the tremendous transformation of teaching and learning taking place today at the intersection of 21st century technology and modern educational theory.

Two-year-old High Tech High receives funding from the Annie E. Casey, Girard, Bill & Melinda Gates and Walton foundations, among others, as well as from philanthropists Gary and Jerri-Ann Jacobs and Irwin Jacobs. Though it has an economically and ethnically diverse student body selected by zip-code-based lottery, it’s a far cry from the typical urban high school today.

It’s not that American high schools aren’t wired up. The Clinton-era legislation aimed at connecting American schools to the Internet succeeded. According to the market research firm Market Data Retrieval, 94 percent of public schools today have Internet access, and more than three-quarters have high-speed lines rather than dial-up connections. The ratio of students to computers is 3.8 to 1 (although the ratio in schools with more than 50 percent minority enrollments is 4.1 to 1).

But simply having technology doesn’t mean that schools are revolutionizing teaching and learning, introducing project-based learning and making other departures from the traditional factory model for schools. Many teachers use computers simply to keep track of attendance and grades, and many students use the Internet mostly for drill and practice, word processing—or to shop for a prom dress.

A number of recent studies have shown that computer use remains primitive in many schools. One found that Wisconsin students used computers frequently for word processing, spreadsheets or research, but far less for simulations and problem solving. A survey of 90,000 Michigan teachers showed that most use the Internet for work, but don’t know how to integrate it into their teaching. (Students are usually so far ahead of teachers technologically that some districts hire students to maintain school web sites and set up networks.) Finally, the Market Data Retrieval survey (which contacted 25,585 K-12 public schools during the 2001-02 school year) found that only 11 percent report that the majority of their teachers “are at an advanced skill level,” meaning that they are innovative technology leaders, or can integrate technology into the curriculum.

“The presence of technology doesn’t lead automatically to change,” says John Bailey, director of the Office of Educational Technology of the U.S. Department of Education. “Right now, folks are just scraping the surface of the opportunities.”

In other words, a gulf no longer looms in American schools between the wired and the unwired. Today the digital divide separates those who integrate technology into teaching and learning from those who don’t. As Maisie McAdoo writes in The Digital Classroom, a collection of articles about technology in schools published by the Harvard Education Letter in 2000, “Equity now centers not on equality of equipment but on quality of use.”

Hands-On Technology
Has an Impact
One place where the necessary equipment and teacher training have successfully transformed pedagogy is New York’s Robert F. Wagner, Jr. Secondary School for Arts and Technology, an alternative school in Long Island City, an industrial area in Queens, New York. There, Marie Elena Kulikowski recently taught her environmental science/government students two lessons on PH levels before sending them outside to fill baggies with soil.

Sixteen-year-old Dorcas Carlo explains that her task was to compare soil in Long Island City and near her home. Carlo’s voice climbs the scale and her cadence speeds up excitedly as she describes mixing the soil samples with distilled water, filtering out dirt, and testing it for PH with sensors hooked up to a laptop. The computer then used Dreamweaver software to make a graph from the PH results. Later, Carlo and her classmates created PowerPoint presentations detailing their use of the scientific method.

“I’ve never experienced anything like that before,” says Carlo, still at school one evening at six p.m. “It’s just so hands-on. I felt like I was in college. It was very professional. When you get introduced to something so complex it becomes very exciting.”

Although it’s more time-consuming than simply lecturing and directing the students to test lemon juice and milk of magnesia with litmus paper, Kulikowski prefers shepherding them through field work with the high-tech equipment. She senses—as academic research has concluded—that students learn more and understand better when they’re interested in what they’re learning.

“They were kind of bored sitting in the classroom listening to me and taking notes from the board,” she says. “Now we actually get out there and do lots of hands-on activities. That’s always more exciting for the kids, and I think they learn better that way. It’s a memorable experience.”

Replacing the lecture-notes-test format with project-based, hands-on learning is only one of the technology-driven transformations taking place today in American high schools. Relationships are changing too, as teachers and students e-mail each other, and everyone e-mails the principal.

Next page: A survey of 90,000 Michigan teachers showed that most use the Internet for work, but don’t know how to integrate it into their teaching.

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