Technology Will Not Save Us (But Our Students Will)
Two years ago, before I began my master’s program, if you had asked me to describe my thoughts on teaching and learning with technology, I would have shared an anecdote about an influential creative writing class I took in college. When technology is at its best, I came to understand, it facilitates creativity, amplifies students’ voices, and builds community. I still strive to keep creativity, students, and community at the center of my pedagogy. However, since embarking on my master’s degree, my thoughts on technology have grown more complex.
As I wrote elsewhere, my coursework has helped me articulate what will be a lifelong question: how do I realize the possibilities of technology to creatively combine the lessons of maker education and design thinking to maximize student voice in order to empower students to solve problems that will make our world a more just, equitable place?
I had a vague notion of what Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math (STEAM) education looked like before I completed the course Adapting Innovative Technologies in Education. Students in the United States lagged behind their peers in other countries on multiple measures, so to close the gap, more programs should target the hard sciences and related fields. The least clear element was how the arts fit into this call for more scientists, coders, engineers, and mathematicians.
Then I read about maker education and the learning theories that support it, constructivism and constructionism. I was inspired. Student-centered and hands-on, maker education emphasizes curiosity and play. It encourages students to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes by turning to peers within the community for assistance. And it offered a way for me to translate the digital world of my college creative writing course into a physical environment.
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I accomplished this act of transformation four months after completing Adapting Innovative Technologies in Education during my unit on Sigmund Freud and the mind. Previously, I had assigned students a group; provided each group a list of memories, urges, and feelings; and asked students to organize those memories, urges, and feelings in a drawing of a mind. The activity had its positives: it required students to collaborate, using their collective creativity to produce an original idea about the inner workings of the mind. Yet the activity was not without limitations. The canvas, for one, restricted the drawing to a standard piece of paper. And while a drawing opens multiple possibilities, it is nonetheless a two-dimensional creation that inevitably fell to one student to complete while the other groupmates looked on (or, more frequently, chatted about anything other than English class).
Enter STEAM. One of the reasons I’m so intrigued by maker education in the English classroom is its novelty. Students expect to construct models of a cell in biology; they don’t expect to build models in English class. Of course novelty for novelty’s sake is not a rationale to use in the classroom. But as I learned from implementing a maker-inspired activity — in this case, building a model of the mind — carefully considered novelty supports creativity. Carefully considered novelty challenges students to express their ideas in new ways, articulating their understanding and misunderstanding in the process, which in turn provides me with information I can use to craft future lessons.
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Novelty isn’t just about the student experience, however. Maker education has forced me to rethink how I teach. Never one to lecture, I strive to place student-driven learning at the center of my pedagogy. Technology has helped me accomplish this goal, evidenced by lessons like my listicle. But what counts as technology? Not just a computer, not just Google Apps for Education. Paper and scissors, tape and string: these are technologies, too, I was reminded, and all can be put to good use in the English classroom.
In the end, one of the most lasting and important consequences of maker education on my pedagogy is the way it’s made me think like a kid. Or perhaps like a kindergarten teacher. I mean that I understand playing is synonymous with learning. A high school English class does not need to be read this novel, discuss this novel, write an essay about this novel ad infinitum. Ad nauseam, really. A high school English class can be teenagers laughing as they make a model of the mind, one group building a cloud, another a palm tree, and a third an open book.
Design thinking has proven to be another influential framework I learned about in my coursework. I was immersed in design thinking as part of the class Learning Technology by Design, in which I guided a project through the Stanford Design School’s five design modes: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. My finished project was a digital portfolio template and organization system created using Google Apps for Education.
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Each design mode helped me understand something new about my practice. For example, prior to completing the empathy mode, I was operating under the assumption that students wouldn’t be too concerned about having to include work on which they struggled as part of their digital portfolio. I had neglected to try to experience the problem from the student point of view. And, sure enough, when interviewing my students about the portfolio, a student raised her hand and shared that some people might not want to broadcast their struggles. My student’s question prompted me to re-revaluate both the assignment as well as how effectively (or ineffectively) I was framing my students’ mistakes in class. Was I communicating mistakes as productive possibilities? Or was I judging mistakes as dead-end failures? Such is the legacy of the empathy mode on my practice: it’s reinforced the need to always start with my students, and it has ensured that I will walk next to them, listening, offering my expertise and support, as they lead me to where they want to go.
The empathize mode’s focus on the student is another reminder of maker education’s student-centered pedagogy. Another overlap between the frameworks can be seen in the ideate mode. The ideate mode prioritizes flare over focus. It embraces randomness, but it’s not randomness for randomness’ sake. It’s randomness as a strategy to produce new (and messy) possibilities that gives way to higher order thinking, like searching for patterns. Ideation is productive play.
The ideate stage helped me understand that I don’t feel pressure when I’m playing. The self-editing voice in my head is quiet. Lowering the volume of that doubting voice is especially important for students. Adolescents are so quick to dismiss their ideas as insufficient or inferior. By emphasizing generating ideas over evaluating ideas, the ideate mode grants students the independence to have fun because they’re not operating in an environment muggy with judgement.
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If maker education and design thinking cleared new paths for student-driven learning, then my lessons on how people learn, gained in the course Technology, Teaching, and Learning Across the Curriculum, helped me predict where those new paths might get snarled in the underbrush or end in cliffs. This act of prediction does not require a crystal ball. No, to understand where my students might struggle depends on my ability to apply the lessons of cognitive load theory.
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A brain can only handle so much information at any one time. A text’s difficulty (intrinsic load) and how that text is presented on the page (extrinsic load) are two barriers to learning. Germane load, or the activation of prior knowledge to contextualize information, aids in facilitating a student’s learning. Now when I’m in the process of creating a lesson, I return to the importance of germane cognitive load and how I can keep it high for my students. One solution is to constantly ask my students to activate their prior knowledge on a subject, discuss how what we’re learning connects to that knowledge, and then reflect together on how what we’ve learned has changed or deepened that prior knowledge. Such an ongoing conversation makes explicit the thinking habits of experts, a process that by definition requires instruction on cognitive load.
Because I’m all for demystifying how our minds work, especially if it means students feel empowered along the way. Teenagers are too often told adolescence is a time of crazed hormones and frazzled brains. Replacing destructive stereotypes with good old fashioned science can, I think, provide students with agency and feelings of control.
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These feelings are vital for students to experience. Autonomy — along with competency and relatedness — encourage students’ intrinsic motivation (Tough, 2016). Technology can combine all three elements, as I learned in another key lesson in Technology, Teaching, and Learning Across the Curriculum. I chose to research online collaborative annotation tools for a project on new media texts and tools. By using the browser extension Hypothes.is to collaboratively annotate online texts, students make their individual and collective thinking explicit. Students use the tool to demonstrate their understanding of the text; the tool gives students opportunities to ask questions of the text and of each other. Students then become the teacher, answering their peers’ questions and increasing their own understanding in the process. For my part, I can read their annotations, which leads to improved classroom instruction because I can design lessons in response to students’ (mis)understanding.
And so I return to what has emerged as a central theme of my learning at Michigan State: how and why to use technology in the service of student-driven curiosity and creativity. I’ve achieved a deeper understanding of how my students learn and how I can design my lessons to best support them. Sure, I know more facts than when I began, but just as important are the questions I’m able to ask to guide my teaching. Here, in no particular order, is a list of the Top Ten Questions I Now Ask Thanks to My Master of Arts in Educational Technology:​
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How can I redesign this lesson so that students are building their own knowledge?
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Am I giving students time to play?
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Am I giving students time to reflect on their learning?
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Where in my curriculum have I created opportunities for students to explore their questions and passions?
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Have I designed my lesson starting from a place of empathy?
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How am I managing intrinsic, extraneous, and germane cognitive load?
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How and why am I using technology to amplify students’ voices?
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Where have I created a chance for students to collaborate on an authentic learning challenge?
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How and why am I using technology to engage students in addressing current events
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Does this technology add a new, critical dimension to the students’ learning, or does it simply digitize a traditional learning method?
That final question suggests a certain skepticism when it comes to the promises of technology. And indeed, one of the most unanticipated — and important — results of my master’s program has been my exposure to the many people who are deeply critical of educational technology and the promises made by technology companies to revolutionize learning. Whether it’s Audrey Watters on ed tech’s zombie ideas that won’t die despite evidence they’re terrible, or Chris Gilliard on the intersection of technology, data, and surveillance, these thinkers have opened my eyes to the real dangers technology poses not just to education but to our society as a whole.
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Yet I cannot pretend like digital technology is going to vanish from our lives and our classrooms. And technology is not inherently malevolent. But using technology in the classroom requires awareness. People — usually white, cis-gendered men — build the technology we use, and so it’s incumbent upon all teachers to proceed with the knowledge that technology contains biases, contains politics, and we must weigh these often invisible forces against a technology’s affordances.
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I come back to the final part of my guiding question, which is this: how do I empower students to solve problems that will make our world a more just, equitable place? Technology has an important role to play in answering this question, but it will not solve our problems because sometimes it is the problem. The solution, I know, must always, always grow from human relationships. From the bonds created and sustained between teachers and those young people laughing and jostling, struggling with challenges visible and not, our students.
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References
Tough, P. (2016). Helping children succeed: What works and why. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.