Is this the most exciting time in education history?

"It’s the end of the world as we know it.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.

It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine."

-R.E.M.

The potential for innovation and new solutions to deliver education has never been so high.  Traditional learning models, like those many of us grew up with, are being transformed.  It seems every few months a new idea for learning is being introduced.  In just the last few years, we’ve seen examples such as, distance learning, blended learning, personalized learning, and flipped classroom models take off.  Many in the education world believe we’re just getting warmed up!  I am optimistic because the capabilities technology and the web deliver are creating powerful tools that will continue to advance and become more readily available to everyone. 

During this time of transformational innovation, it is critical we keep our focus on learning and not on technology.  We have to make sure we aren’t just automating education, and/or making it more efficient.  Turning a textbook into a etextbook or moving from delivering a lecture in a class to delivering a lecture on video are examples of what I mean. 

I am passionate about education because I know first hand that education can be the silver bullet for millions of children and their families living in poverty.  Education has the potential to break the cycle of poverty in just one generation.  I believe this because like countless others I’ve met throughout my journey, I am living proof.  

The worry I have is that the education I received isn’t suitable for the world we live in today and not nearly suitable for the world we are constructing.  It’s an absolute certainty that students are going to need more advanced skills.  For example, we often talk about collaboration and global competency skills.  Today, we can work with anyone, anywhere in the world but our schools are still treating students as individuals who must work alone.  What would you do if you were a teacher and two students walked up to the front of your class, handed you a test, and said, “We did this together!”  Why is collaboration cheating? 

We need to make sure their learning experiences provide them the relevance and engagement they need as they build the skills for the future. It’s more than just building digital citizenship skills; they need to become digital leaders. 

In order to make this a reality, we need to focus on three key areas.   

First, we need to make sure schools have adequate broadband access.  We would never run a school without lights or heat.  For many schools, Internet access is considered a “nice to have” commodity, not a necessity.  Yet our education system is preparing students for a world where the Internet is ingrained into higher education, business practices, and our daily lives in general, a world where many of the latest teaching tools run on the web.  

Second, we need to leverage the power and prevalence of the web as we create new learning models.  Most students nowadays are growing up with the understanding that the web is where they go to get the knowledge and resources they are looking for.  By recognizing that how we learned is different than the way our children learn, school leaders can take advantage of the habits this tech-literate generation have developed.  This became painfully clear to me when my daughter and I were buying her a ukulele when we visited Hawaii a couple of years ago.  As we were leaving the store, I noticed instruction books and DVDs on how to play the ukulele.  I asked my daughter if she wanted to pick some up so she can learn how to play (after all, that was how I learned).  She looked at me like there was something wrong with me.  Of course, she doesn’t need an instruction book or DVD.  She is going to learn by watching YouTube videos.  As educators, we are starting to understand the impact the web can have.  Videos, web applications, interactive content, and collective pools of knowledge make the world’s information accessible from multiple devices 24 hours a day seven days a week.  

Third, we have to put tools in the hands of teachers and students so that they can access the rich content of an ever-expanding web.  School administrators need to choose devices that not only give students and faculty access to that content, but that are also pain-free and easy to use.  The devices have to be near invisible so that the focus remains on the teaching and learning, not the technology.  What school leaders need is to think about is what happens when you go from having 30 computers in a classroom, to 30,000 in a school district.  How you scale and how you manage the technology is a critical part of planning how to integrate it into the curriculum.  Just as important, we have to let teachers develop the knowledge, skills, and abilities to take advantage of these tools.  Today’s teachers are the ones who are going to create the new learning models we will use for generations to come!  Great professional development has never been so important.

This is an exhilarating time in education.  I know if we continue to be innovative and open to new ideas, education can be the silver bullet it was for me.  I am looking forward to watching the traditional model expand into engaging and relevant methods that will prepare our students to live in what is becoming the most stimulating and exhilarating time in history!

Abraham Lincoln was a Wimp

"You can not fail if you resolutely determine that you will not."

- Abraham Lincoln

Another critical skill students need to develop is the ability to analyze and assess information.  Information is coming at us at a pace many find overwhelming.  The quantity of global information grows at an astonishing speed.  For example, in just 24 hours, 2 million blog posts are written!  In the same time frame, enough information is consumed by Internet traffic to fill 168 million DVDs.  We send 284 billion emails every day.  It feels like most of those end up in my inbox.  Eric Schmidt has said he thinks it will take us 300 years to index and make all the world’s information searchable.  You can also look at the eruption of video creation.  YouTube, which is becoming an essential tool in the classroom, adds content at a rate that is hard to grasp.  Every minute, 72 hours of video is uploaded on YouTube!  That means that no matter how hard your kids try, and mine is trying very hard,  they will never be able to watch all the videos on YouTube. 

All the data I’ve seen suggests that most of us are, quite frankly, terrible searchers.  We just have to come to grips with that.  Most of us never developed the skills required to truly utilize the information of a digital world.  If you don’t believe me, you can go do an assessment and test your search skills.  However, I can save you time.  Trust me, you are not a good searcher.  If you don’t believe me, here is a quick self evaluation you can do to determine if I’m on the right path.

First, if you type a question mark into the search bar, you are a terrible searcher.  To go further, if you type a whole sentence in the bar, you are wasting a whole bunch of time.  If your search looks like this, “What was the date of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address?” instead of, “gettysburg date” the earth is spinning rapidly and you are wasting a lot of that spin!

Second, do you know what Command F (on a Mac – I don’t do Windows) does on a webpage?  Would you believe 90% of people have no idea what this time saving, search altering capability does?  Nope, I’m not going to tell you.  Why don’t you go search, “What happens when I type Command F on my Mac when I’m on a webpage?” 

My point is, if we are bad searchers, how are we teaching students to search?  How are we teaching them to make sense of information?  How are we teaching them to vet and dig deep into all the data available to us?  We need to help students build these skills.  Again, not necessarily as a separate subject, but more in what they do every day.  How can we incorporate technology, search and analytical skills to develop new engaging and relevant learning content for our students?

I have a confession to make.  I am a history and political junkie.  It feels good to get that off my chest.  The second part of that confession is that I have turned my kids into junkies.  This is especially true of American history and how politics coats and is engrossed in all our history.

A few Sundays ago, I was partaking in one of my favorite activities.  I was on the couch reading my paper copy of the New York Times (yes, I’ve been getting the paper Sunday times for as long as I can remember.)  I was reading their endorsement of Barak Obama.  I was summarizing the text to my daughter, who was sitting next to me (she was over to watch the Giants game with me – another one of my favorite activities, which makes me worried that so many of them involve my couch).  Her reaction was interesting but probably conventional wisdom, “well, of course they endorsed Obama. It’s a left leaning paper and they will always back the Democrat.”  She was also questioning the value of the endorsement, and if it would sway voters.  What a great opportunity to take a nose dive into history!

I asked, “well, do we know if that’s true?”  Also, have they always been right?  Has their endorsement meant anything?”  And so on, and so on.   We grabbed the laptop and started researching.  It wasn’t long before we were into some interesting material.  After we did the analysis of how many Republicans and Democrats the paper supported since they began this in 1860, and how many times they were right, we branched off into some really thought-provoking information!  We got into the first endorsement the paper ever made.  The New York Times endorsed Abraham Lincoln for President in 1860.  We found the actual text of the endorsement and all of a sudden we were in a time travel machine and found ourselves in the middle of what was happening in the country in October, 1860, more than 150 years ago!

We all learned history in a very linear and stagnate way.  First President Lincoln got elected, then he led the north in the Civil War, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves, the North won the Civil War, and then he was assassinated in a theater.  When you learn it that way, it feels like one thing lead to another in very logical way.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Easy access to technology and the web gives us this time travel capability.  The combination helps us get into what was actually occurring at the time.  So we read the endorsement and what did we discover?  That folks in 1860 were making things up as they went, just like we do.  That they had no idea what was going on or what would happen!  Theirs was a messy present and they were looking at a ambiguous future.  Slippery slope theories were in full effect!

For example, in the endorsement, the paper writes:

“…there is a large class of men who have a vague but real apprehension that something terrible is to follow the election of a Republican President.  They fear that the South will be excluded by law from the territories, that slaves will be set free in the District of Columbia, that inter-state Slave trade will be prohibited, and a great variety of legislative encroachments on Southern rights will be perpetrated.”

In other words, there seems to be all these “real” but unfounded and silly worries that things in our country were going to change.  Nonsense says the editorial board at the New York Times.  They go out of their way to put to rest these unrealistic concerns.  The paper goes on:

“…whatever may be the wishes of the Republicans on these topics, they are not likely to have any opportunity to carry them into effect.”

They further go on to describe how the Democrats control congress and they would never let any of these actions take place.  They go as far as concluding that even if the Democrats lost the Senate (fat chance), the House is so strong that it’s the Democrats who are going to run things and make all the decisions.  Wow!  Really?  Boy did they call this one wrong huh?  Not only that, we were able to tie that directly to what’s going on today.  Does it matter who controls the House?  The Senate?  Can we bring about change no matter who’s in power in Congress?  The paper continues to make it’s point:

“It will not be easy…for Mr. Lincoln to do much mischief…He seems to us much more likely to be too good natured and tolerant towards his opponents, then not enough so.  Rail-splitting is not an exciting occupation.  It does not tend to cultivate the hot and angry passions of the heart…we have not the slightest doubt, therefore, that Prof. Lincoln will disappoint utterly the sanguinary expectations (of those that want change)…”

Sound familiar?  In other words, this Lincoln dude is a wimp.  Even if he had the House and the Senate, he’s still not going to do anything!  Don’t worry, nothing is going to happen.  This guy is a rail splitter, and we all know how ”those people” are.  I think they might have missed this call.  Talk about a dis!  We imagined what the board would say if someone suggested that Lincoln would be one of our greatest and most beloved presidents in our history, one we would build monuments to.  How hard would the laughter be?  Sound familiar?

So we dove deeper.  We read more about what was going on at the time.  The paranoia in the south.  The lack of conviction in the North.  We dove into the back and forth.  We used Google earth to look at the country in 1860 and where the strongholds were.  We saw where the battles took place and how many men died in the war.  We saw how the South was set up and where we thought they made some seriously bad calculations.  We learned about how the Navy was used by the north.  We listened to a audio interpretation of the Gettysburg address, in the pace and tone Lincoln would have read it.  We spent all afternoon talking about it.  We asked critical questions like, what would have happened if the south actually listened to the Times (several states in the south panicked after the election and without southern unity, declared their independence on their own.)  We compared it to what is going on today in our nation and in our politics.  How both sides lay out a vision of what’s going to happen to our country if we pick one guy over another.  What we learned is that history is a recording of chaos that only make sense in the aftermath, when all the dust settles.

That’s the power of technology and the web.  We can jump into a time machine and visit the past.  Not only so we can understand what happened, but also so we can learn how it applies to today and our potential future.  We also learned that the New York Times, even 150 years ago, has no idea what it’s talking about. 

It looks like Abraham Lincoln didn’t turn out to be so wimpy huh?

District Administration Interview

I haven't been able to post a new blog post in a few weeks due to all the traveling I've been doing and the fact that I was writing posts for other publications.  Here is one of them.  It is a follow up interview to a presentation I did at a District Administration Leadership Summit here in Phoenix.  There is a link to the video of the presentation at the end of this post.  I don't know if the word "invigorating" has ever been used to describe me.  Load mouth yes...invigorating not so much...

Q&A: With Jaime Casap, Senior Education Evangelist, Google

A follow-up to Casap's invigorating September DALI Summit keynote

Publication Date: 

November, 2012

 At the September District Administration Leadership Institute Summit in Phoenix, Ariz., Jaime Casap, chief education evangelist, Google, Inc., in his presentation, got the audience thinking about educational vision and where we need to be with regard to creating a learning environment that brings out the best in every child. We wanted to continue this critical conversation, so we followed up with Casap to find out how districts can jump-start their shift to a technology-pervasive learning environment.

What are three priorities K12 administrators need to make when it comes to technology?

The first would be broadband access. Our education system is preparing students for a world where the internet is ingrained into higher education, business practices, and our daily lives in general. Broadband access lets teachers take advantage of those tools and exposes students to the type of learning and working environment they will encounter in the future.

The second is learning to leverage the power and prevalence of the web to create a learning platform. As educators, we are starting to understand the impact the web can have. Videos, applications, interactive content, and knowledge bases make the world’s information accessible from multiple devices 24/7.  

And the third priority is putting equipment in the hands of teachers and students so they can access the rich content of an ever-expanding web. School administrators need to choose devices that not only give students and faculty access to that content, but that are nearly invisible so that the focus remains on the teaching and learning, not on the technology.

Of all the technologies available for K12, which category do you like the best for schools?

I always look for opportunities to emphasize the potential of the web as a common learning platform. Although some wouldn’t call the web “technology,” I certainly do. There used to be clear lines between technologies. You had hardware, software, applications. More and more, all technology is web-based.

What is one way superintendents and teachers can begin to think differently about facilitating education through technology that would be quick and easy and helpful right out of the gate?

School leaders have to look at technology not just in terms of how it can help transform educational practices and models in the future, but also in how it can help us today. If you can look for just two ways technology can help you do your job better, you will create a pattern of looking for more. Eventually, you will start to see how technology can be a catalyst to transforming education. There are hundreds of way teachers and administrators can quickly use technology and the web to improve their day-to-day work.

Other than DALI and District Administration, which magazines/websites/conferences would you recommend for superintendents and administrators to regularly review/attend?

I think the most important conferences that superintendents and administrators can attend are the local ones in their own backyards. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with superintendents and principals who ask me for case studies of schools that are doing great things with technology. More often than not, I’m able to introduce them to schools across the street! Getting together with their peers in the same state and talking with each other about what they are doing with technology in education and the web as a learning platform can go a long way!

Watch a video of Jaime Casap's presentation here.

Desks shown to harm student education

“So no matter what you been through, no matter what you into

No matter what you see when you look outside your window

Brown grass or green grass, picket fence or barbed wire

Never ever put them down, you just lift your arms higher

Raise 'em 'til your arms tired let 'em know you here

That you struggling, survivin', that you gon' persevere

Yeah, ain't nobody leavin', nobody goin' home

Even if they turn the lights out, the show is goin' on”  

- Lupe Fiasco 

It seems like there is no shortage of articles that talk about how technology doesn’t improve education.  The focus is usually around the impact of the technology on test scores.  The question these articles answer is this: does the use of technology in the classroom improve test scores?  The methodology they use to answer this question is simple.  They look at any school who has put “technology” into some of their classrooms, they wait a school year, and then they compare last year’s test scores with this year’s test scores.  They look at the scores and conclude that the use of “technology” doesn’t improve test scores, therefore the impact of the technology on education at best is flat.

For some reason I still really can’t understand, the New York Times used this simple erroneous methodology and argument in a bunch of education technology articles last year.  This surprised me.  As a long time subscriber (I’ve been getting the hard copy of the Sunday Times dropped on my doorstep since I can remember…I would shut off cable before I stopped my NYTs if I had to choose), I expect so much more from the nation’s standard of journalism.  I asked myself on more than one occasion, why would the New York Times simply ask the wrong questions? 

Everyone I regard in the education and the education technology space knows that technology doesn’t improve education outcomes.  They all recognize that great education improves education, not technology, or anything else for that matter.

Last year, the New York Times wrote no articles about how school lighting doesn’t improve test scores.  They wrote no articles on how the use of text books, a $8 billion dollar annual expenditure by the way, does not improve test scores.  Can you imagine the New York Times blaming the textbook industry for our nation’s appalling dropout rate?  Without even having to search, I am confident the New York Times did not write a single article on how the use of desks in the classroom do not improve student test scores.   Why is that?  It’s pretty simple actually.  It is clear all these things are just tools we use to enable education.  The use of a computer in a classroom is as powerless as a desk in improving test scores unless it is used in support of a great educational model. 

We don’t talk about desks the way we talk about computers.  We don’t go to desk conferences or develop desk implementation plans.  We don’t have desk professional development plans.  We don’t think about the question of equity when it comes to desks.  We would never say, “we only have budget for 90 desks but have 300 students.  We’re going to have to figure out which students stand all day.”  We don’t question the need of desks in the classroom and I would argue they are more detrimental to education than other tools we use.  For example, we now have enough evidence that shows sitting all day is bad for you.  This is why you are seeing an explosion of stand up desks in offices across the country.  Desks also create this individualized island, designed to fit in rows and face forward, which creates what I call “peer barriers” and limits collaboration with other students.  Finally, the way they are designed, they are perfectly made to fall asleep on.  Where’s the New York Times article on that story?

The reason why you don’t find articles about the impact of desks on test scores is because it’s a ridiculous correlation.  The use of laptops in the classroom, like the desks, have nothing to do with test scores.  Only great education directly effects test scores (let’s leave the argument as to why we shouldn’t even be talking about test scores for another post).  When used as an enabling tool, laptops, the web, smart boards, tablets, and anything else we call “technology” has an enormous impact on education. 

There is plenty of data that supports the use of technology as an enabling tool.  For example, In a study called, “Intertwining Digital Content and One-on-One Laptop Environment in Teaching and Learning: Lessons from the Time to Know Program” (I appreciate how they like to keep the names of these studies as short as possible), (2012 Journal of Research on Technology in Education), the correlation between good education and technology is clear.  The study looked at how one-to-one computing programs effected teaching and learning practices as well as student learning achievements.  The study found consistent and highly positive outcomes in student math and reading achievement.  They also found higher student attendance, and decreased disciplinary actions.

As in other studies, this one showed that a technology enabled learning environment can more effectively promote “social-constructivist educational goals, such as higher-order thinking skills, learning motivation, and teamwork.”  To me, the highlight of this study wasn’t the increase in scores or how the technology helped engage students.  To many of us, that just makes sense.  The highlight of this study is how they emphasized the following: “to achieve this change, a school system must go through major processes.  It requires setting new educational objectives, preparing new curricula, developing digital instructional material aligned with new learning standards, designing a new teaching and learning environment, training teachers, creating a school climate that is conducive to educational technology, and so on.”  In other words, it’s like we used to say in the consulting world I spent six year in, “whatever you do, don’t help your clients automate bad processes, you’re just helping make bad things happen faster.” 

The other key component you find in good education technology studies is the duration of the study.  Researchers are starting to recognize that the real benefits and any significant change start to appear over a length of time.  In other words, even when you fix everything in the education model, it takes a few years to start seeing dramatic shifts in improvement.  A six month study isn’t good enough.   

We shouldn’t be teaching technology, we should be using technology to teach.  If we are using technology correctly, it should be invisible.  When I talk about my work and the projects I’m involved in, I never talk about how I used my tools.  The tools are just there.  Just like it is for us, the technology should be part of the support structure.  The potential benefits are tremendous.   Lots of studies like the one quoted above show that technology is ideal in supporting and enabling a learner-centric environment.  In these environments, students feel critical things like autonomy, engagement, and purpose.  They feel ownership over what they learn and how they learn it.  This type of environment clearly leads to students who are involved in their learning and more importantly, are willing and able to learn.  With this autonomy, students learn at their pace and teachers serve as facilitators and not as knowledge towers.  Technology can help these environments by giving students the opportunity to work and learn collaboratively with other students to solve problems and create and share new ideas.   We can produce and implement new creative assessment tools that promote learning, making sure students are involved in constructing their own self and peer driven assessments. 

These are just some of the possibilities with using technology in education.   Until we stop seeing technology as a nice to have, or as the line item in the budget that gets cut because it is “outside of learning goals,” we will not be able to fully realize it’s potential value.  We would never dream of building a new school with air-conditioning on only two floors or electricity in only three of the four buildings.  Until we start seeing broadband as electricity, and computing capabilities as desks, we are a long way from that realization.