Tag: Edtech

Michael Enright is interviewing 4 “new” teachers on Sunday Edition today (though I’m not sure a year 7 teacher qualifies as new).  Here are the questions he asked these bright and shiny teachers from across Canada.  Once he settled them in, the discussion got real!

Being an interrogative, tarnished, unpicked teacher, I thought I’d throw in my two cents too!  Feel free to grab the questions and reply for yourself below…

Why did you become a teacher?
I got downsized 3 times in business, and started to get the sense that you’ll get used and tossed by business no matter how hard you work at it.  You’ll put in years above and beyond and get chucked when it suits them.  I’d taught in Japan for a couple of years and my wife was a teacher.  When the last downsize happened she encouraged me to go take teacher’s college in Ontario.  I didn’t like school, didn’t do particularly well at it, and still think it’s a bit of a holding cell for disenfranchised young citizens (if the voting age was changed to 16, graduation age would quickly follow it).

I’ve learned in many different environments from classrooms to online to machine shops.  In my experience classrooms tend to be more about control than learning.  Every year before I go back into the classroom I listen to Another Brick In The Wall, and then promise never to do that to anyone.  It’s very easy for education to become a mechanical system.

I love learning, and I see my students as people, not statistics.  I loved being Sensei in Japan, being ‘teacher’ in Canada isn’t quite as renowned, but I’m dedicated to my professional practice and believe that what I do matters.

Are you a minority in your field (gender? race? age?)  What’s that like?
I was the oldest in my teacher training program by many years.  Most of my colleagues were career eductionalists (public school straight into university straight into teacher’s college straight into teaching).  I often found myself applying experience to what was a challenging teaching program while the pro-students choked on the work loads.

I’ve often found it difficult to see eye to eye with how academic teachers do things.  But one of the most important things about teachers is that they represent all aspects of society.  If the only teachers students met were academic A+ average robots, many students would be alienated.  It’s important that we have a diverse teaching population for a diverse student population.  Mentors aren’t found in ranks of similar people.

Has being a teacher changed you?
I’ve really enjoyed building a profession knowing that I can commit myself to it and not get dumped because of a spreadsheet.  That sense of security allows me to do an important job well.  It allows me to justify the thousands of dollars I’ve spent on my own qualifications without fear that it may be wasted.  Teaching is a long view profession that I enjoy developing year after year.

There has been a lot of latitude in job options, so I’m never bored.  Teaching hasn’t changed me much, but I’ve finally found a profession that matches my intensity.  If it’s changed me at all, it’s made me a bit more reluctant to argue ideas (believe it or not), while I work out all sides of an issue.  Teaching makes you less likely to jump to conclusions.

Regionally, what’s challenging about your job?
On the edge of rural and urban Canada, I have a great deal of difficulty dealing with students driving to school with large rebel flags in their pickup trucks.  The overt racism can be shocking (though it tends to be repeated from the dinner table and is based more on a lack of experience than a sense of actual hatred).  I enjoy taking as many students as possible on field trips to Toronto – it’s good for them, though many fear they will be murdered.

Anyone spread too thin by teaching?
I tend to jump into breaches, suddenly find myself teaching pilot programs, heading departments, running sports and clubs, presenting at conferences, representing in the union… often all at the same time.  My wife teaches too, and between us I feel a great deal of tension wanting to participate in the full spectrum of teaching related work and keeping up with family commitments.

One of the hardest things I’ve found in teaching (I’m going into year 9) is the gearing.  You go at 110% all semester and then suddenly it’s exams.  In June it then means summer.  The change in gears is stressful, it’s hard to put it down, and it gets awfully heavy if you don’t.

I’ve had half a dozen distinct careers… none have been remotely as emotionally, physically and intellectually exhausting as teaching.  If you’re at work, you’re full on, all the time.  There are no easy days when you feel like taking it slow.  If you’re away, you’re still planning all the work, so you’re never really off.  When you are there, you’re surrounded by people, an unfortunate percentage of whom are of questionable personal hygiene.  You get sick a lot.  You make your family sick a lot.  All while going 100%, all the time.

Are we asking teachers to do too much?

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/08/16/broten-tackles-teacher-pay “no average Ontarian would expect a 5.5% pay hike in these economic times,  just because they took the summer off and refused to negotiate” Average Ontarians don’t have 5+ years of higher education. The vast majority of teachers don’t take the summer off. Teacher’s didn’t refuse the negotiate, the government did and then created an illegal forced contract that has since been struck down.

If their bosses are going to publicly humiliate them and ignore the actual job in favor of public illusions about the profession, then yes, we are asking teachers to do too much without recognizing what the job actually is.  I have been teaching for 8 years and have yet to have a ‘summer off’.  I know some teachers do walk away and do nothing, but many more don’t.  If you’re going to represent a profession by their worst members, no job in the world is going to look appealing.  Teachers don’t mind doing the extra work, they tend to do it for the right reasons (passion), but not if it’s going to be used against them, which it has been.

How do you deal with the bureaucracy?
Cautiously, especially now that I understand I work for a ministry that is run by morally bankrupt vote grabbers who stand for nothing and are willing to toss any ideal they claim to represent into the fire if they think it’ll satisfy the mob.

I’ve found my school admin to be relatively easy to work with.  The vast majority are professional and dedicated to fair, reasonable work.  I’m finding the larger, political structures to be somewhat less trustworthy.

What is the relationship between teachers and the ministry (bureaucracy)?
See above.  No real problems until this year.  We do our job very well, they support us, we look fantastic in UN rankings of world education systems.  Apparently we can trash that if it means winning a single by-election.  Now I am trying not to be hostile, though it is hard when your boss openly lies about you in the media.

Yes, going to school this year has been overshadowed by some very negative politics.  The only thing I find more frustrating are head-in-the-sand teachers who refuse to acknowledge anything about it.  It affects them, but they think they’re above it.  How they can call themselves genuine when they are willfully ignorant of the hypocrisy hurting their profession is annoying.  Meanwhile, they appear to be content letting other people throw themselves into a fight that will benefit them while they do nothing about it.  I wonder how they teach students about democracies and human rights, it isn’t through example.

Do teachers drive students to do well in standardized testing?  Is it a race?
I hate that they do, but they do.  Test scores have dictated where I live, which makes me sad.  Not all schools are created equally, and people grasp at anything to distinguish them.  I’m an advocate of saving the millions we spend a year on testing by cancelling it.  The only way we can get better is by NOT following bad US habits down the toilet.  Simplifying learning into standardized testing is beneath the standard we’ve set for ourselves.

How do you handle parents with unreal expectations?  or an abiding dislike of teachers?
The second bit I get a lot of around this very conservative (never been anything else) riding.  As a general rule I try and deal directly with students, my covenant is with them.  Having said that, I use technology to try and make my teaching as radically transparent as possible.  If there are no surprises, there are usually no complaints.

I also approach teaching trying not to prejudice students.  I’ve seen too many teachers gossip about a student and destroy any chance for them to build a new relationship with a different teacher.  I’ve had very good relationships with students who have been nightmares for others.  I try to avoid that kind of talk – it leads to confrontations with parents.

Even the most hateful parent won’t have a complaint if I’m straight up and direct with the student and them about what a course is and how to do well in it.  The fact that I can talk to them from their own experiences (not just as an Ed-bot) doesn’t hurt either.  It’s a lot easier to commiserate with someone who has been downsized when you’ve experienced it yourself.  The shiny educationalist would find that challenging.

“You don’t know what it’s like out there, you’ve never worked in the private sector, They expect results! (shudder)”.

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CLICK HERE to listen to the original interviews.  As mentioned, once they get settled in and get past the bright, shiny stuff, it gets real!

***
Here are the questions boiled down.  Feel free to copy and paste in to go face to face with Enright yourself!

Why did you become a teacher?
Are you a minority in your field (gender? race? age?)  What’s that like?
Has being a teacher changed you?
Regionally, what’s challenging about your job?
Anyone else spread too thin by teaching?
Are we asking teachers to do too much?
How do you deal with the bureaucracy?
What is the relationship between teachers and the ministry?
Do teachers drive students to do well in standardized testing?  Is it a race?
How do you handle parents with unreal expectations?  or an abiding dislike of teachers?

At the last Educational Computing Conference in Ontario, there were a lot of presentations on digital footprints.  In every case, a few, older Luddites were struggling against a perceived loss of privacy while everyone else was being (as @greatdismal says above so well) ‘benignly assimilated into the borg.’

This is one of those moments where you need to recognize a seismic shift in perception.  Two hundred years ago you weren’t private, you were a public object identified by your clothing, where you lived, how you spoke, who you were related to and what you did for a living.  This common knowledge defined you.  Saying that you didn’t want any of it to get out because you wanted privacy would seem bizarre.

Thirty years ago, you were all of those older ideas of social identity advertising yourself as you moved more efficiently in motorized transport.  Some few found their identities ruled by media, but this was a function of how limited access to that media was.  Three decades ago the first bits of digital information where hanging on you, like your phone number (publicly available in a phone book, and still available through other means if you were struggling to retain the privacy you never had by going unlisted).  Later on fax numbers began to follow us around, and then things got busy.

In the early days of the internet, digital information about us blossomed.  Unlike earlier, industrialized media, the two-way internet pushed everyone into the lime light.  Work emails, then personal emails, then work webpages, then personal webpages, then social media came along and surrounded us with constellations of public information.  We can try and bury our heads in the sand, not participate, not take control of this data, but it won’t succeed in removing you from this equation.

Whenever you make a financial transaction, or communicate, you’re adding data to your digital shadow.  You have a choice to author that data, but if you choose not to, it’ll end up authoring itself, or even worse, someone else will author it for you.

Those digital footprint seminars all came back to the same idea: the most powerful thing you can do in a rapidly expanding world of data is be yourself and present yourself as you want to be perceived.  Burying your head in the sand doesn’t show your best public side to the datasphere.

“The Matrix is everywhere, all around us, even in this very room.  You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television, …you can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes…”

THE OPERATING SYSTEM

An open source, education focused OS based on Linux, LinED was used around the world and developed continuously by legions of users.  You couldn’t access the school internet without installing LinED.  Students installed it as a second OS on their computers and many ended up using it as their primary system because of all the free/subsidized software they could get on it.  A student could outfit a LinEd machine with a full suite of media, gaming and productivity software for less than the cost of a single corporate production suite.

When on a school network designed for it, LinED feeds a continuous stream of activity to your school profile.  Percentages of time with certain web pages open, applications running, even data on eye movement when reading a screen.  Students have continual access to their own data, allowing them to self-evaluate around productive use of time.  This feed back loop was one of the key events that broke the cycle of digital irrelevancy in schools and prompted students to use digital tools effectively, rather than having website designers using them as business interests saw fit.  Using LinED encourages digital citizenship, and digital learning, keeping the massive distraction engine of the internet at bay while still offering students access to resources.  This could only happen in an open source environment; users have to own their thought space online.


THE SOFTWARE

Within the LinED environment, students have quick and easy access to cloud based tools for learning.  But as a redundancy, these cloud based systems also install on-machine apps that allow students to minimize bandwidth use while maximizing productivity.  Network failure no longer means a loss of access to information. Students often fail to notice long return times on network/cloud apps because the work is balanced between their desktop machine and the cloud in such a way as to make bandwidth issues irrelevant.

An intelligent and responsive network enables much more efficient use of network resources.  Web access uses a complex algorithm to prioritize traffic, thus affecting loading times.  A student with a high social media activity and low performance in learning metrics find social media pages being deprioritized and loading more slowly, eventually stopping if they continued to allow themselves to be distracted.  Students who develop a balance between personal web use and learning never notice a slow down.  Students who prioritize learning on the network were rewarded by stunningly fast bandwidth.

Teacher grading is automatically synced with the student data and can be continuously checked by all interested parties.  Success not only means greater resource availability, but also offers support staff an opportunity to see class activity in a live environment, and intervene earlier in order to help students achieve an effective balance.

Any student with a LinED system is able to access apps and software at reduced rates, often free.  Students find that their LinED app ecosystem is rich with resources when compared to the private sector.  Even game companies buy into the system, offering reduced cost or free access to gaming environments tied to educational success.  Good students found themselves with free VirtuWoW and other game accounts on Learning+ servers, where they were able to socially network with other like-minded students, often leading to enrichment and collaboration that further supports them in the classroom and beyond.

This has greatly served to change the definition of student.

By developing a coherent feed-back system between education and technology, students (and teachers) find themselves in a blossoming ecosystem of applications, games and social networks that all benefit and spring from learning focus.  The subtext of learning colours all other opportunities, allowing the idea of continuous erudition to flourish within technology.

Developers quickly find that Learning+ communities online contain highly motivated, engaged and creative individuals, who make ideal Beta communities for developing new media and ideas.  They were willing to test and develop where most vanilla, private users merely wanted to use.  The resource begins to feed itself.

Identifying and rewarding life-long learners goes well beyond what is happening in schools, and has prompted a digital renaissance, eventually outpacing the “limited, short-attention-span, internet for quick gain and empty use” model that preceded it.  Developing interrogative digital citizens was key to this Web3.0 revolution.

THE HARDWARE

The mobilization of technology had already begun prior to the network catching up.  With advances in nano-technology which prompted leaps in quantum computing, mobilization went through a brief period of hyper-miniaturization.  Most computers now consist of small, hands-free devices that linked to interactive holographic displays.  A smartphone sized device now represents the computing power of a typical desktop machine from 2015.  With projected keyboards and screens, the smartphone evolves into the nexus for digital contact without having to carry energy and space intensive peripherals.

All of this was conceptualized prior to the takeoff in nano-technology.  Post nano-tech, manufacture has become a relatively straightforward process and the computer, finally, has become truly personal.  Modern computers act symbiotically with their users, recharging from their activity and enhancing their experiences.  The internet is no longer in cyberspace, cyberspace is now all around us.

In a typical classroom students walk into class with their PCs fully powered (recharged from the compression motion on shoes while walking).  The room’s holographic projector links to each device, bringing the student online and showing them their own enhanced reality.  The card-like smartphone descendants students carry now are resilient, networked and self contained, redundant, self-charging and intuitively designed to enhance and focus, rather than distract and commoditize, their user’s attention.  An app that distracts a user at a critical moment causing injury or damage is legally liable for their distraction.

It has taken many years of intensive reworking to make laws relevant to a cusp-of-a-singularity world.  In most cases, people prepared to step into the singularity do, though many stay behind to shepherd the lost and confused toward the light.

This was almost disastrous initially.  Until the networks and software became individually serving rather than serving marketing interests, the internet was a very dangerous place to be jacked into all the time.  The push for computer control on the roads came after a sharp upspike in accidents when personal holographics first appeared.

It wasn’t until systems like LinED, and the vetted software it allowed, and other systems like VirtuOS that recognized that digital permanency meant that marketing couldn’t be continuous and distraction was libelous.

Wearing a computer is now akin to putting on trousers, everyone does it one leg at a time, but everyone does it.

TVO’s Agenda did a diligent job this week of fact checking following the round table discussion they had with teachers.  In retrospect, what this discussion did was bypass the political spin of teacher unions and the government and give Ontarians an insight into how teachers themselves are seeing this on-going mess.  What I found unnerving was how insular and, in some cases, inaccurate our thinking is.

In post-show fact checking it was shown that some of the commonly held beliefs by teachers were not exactly true.  The bankruptcy lawyer story had been circulated out of the union all year.  Paikin seemed surprised that all the teachers there knew of it, but it was loudly repeated by our unions as a way of framing this disagreement prior to 115 coming in.  In fairness, these lawyers do deal with bankruptcies and they were unfamiliar with education negotiations and were aggressive in their demands, but to call them bankruptcy lawyers shows a use of absolutist language aimed at polarizing union members in order to make them feel victimized.  It’s this kind of manipulation that makes me uneasy.

That the KW bi-election was a reason for the ridiculous piece of legislation called Bill 115 appears  to be a matter of record.  That Kathleen Wynn can say it was a cynical, Machiavellian move to win a bi-election while having voted for it still makes me question her credibility and these ‘social justice’ values she seems to have branded herself with.  In the meantime our unions are still funding the OLP, even as they encourage us to demonstrate in front of their leadership convention.  I’m not sure who is on what side any more.  With four parties involved in this (the provincial government, grassroots union members, union provincial executive who seem out of touch with the members they’ve tried to direct, and school boards), it’s murky at best.


The followup research on the sick days/leave issue indicates just how deeply the political spin of this has cut teachers.  

“…it’s strange that they would seem to think the province would just leave them in the lurch in terms of short-term disability. It either shows a colossal failure of communication on behalf of the government or on behalf of the union to its members. It certainly illustrates that the level of distrust of teachers with the government is extremely high, which is just very, very sad.”

The negativity itself around 115 created such momentum that the provincial executives who were pushing it suddenly found their members turning down contracts they wanted passed.  Executive was building up this fervor as a bargaining tool, but the anger was genuine, and now the rifts between teachers, the government and internally in their unions are deeper than ever.  There hasn’t been a lot of honesty with how this has been managed.  How a teacher couldn’t feel manipulated in this by all the parties involved is beyond me.  Trying to get a clear eye on the issues is almost impossible with all of these giants hurling boulders at each other.

I was ardently against Bill 115, I’m still astonished that it got passed – it is one of the most offensive pieces of ‘law’ ever put into the books.  I was more than willing to go to the wall over fighting it, I still believe we should have walked immediately when it was passed.  As one of the wiser heads in my school said in a staff meeting, “it’s a bad law, you fight bad laws or we lose everything.”  

Watching those teachers on the Agenda line up behind the vitriolic rhetoric of our unions when I find union interests focused on the political self interest of certain (older) members makes me question much of what I’m hearing.  I certainly no longer feel represented by the people who lead us, and while I don’t agree with all of the fact checking done, it does make me question the accuracy of what I’m being told.

I find myself a teacher who is very uncomfortable with how this has been handled, the mess in my own district aside.  The Agenda’s round table only emphasized for me how insulated and groomed our thinking around the turbulence in Ontario education is.

In the tragically depopulated videos suggesting how personalized assessment is to be done, cheerful teachers in half empty, quiet, ordered classrooms dealing with compliant, earnest, hard working children one on one, take a great deal of time reviewing their work in meaningful, specific ways. This is something I often see in ‘this-is-how-you-should-do-it’ videos.

I first noticed this in teacher’s college when the assessment professor gave us an article by a teacher who went into great detail about how teachers should create student specific learning opportunities and assessment. Everyone oo’ed and ah’ed this wonderful insight, but I had a nagging feeling while watching it. Two minutes on the interwebs at home that night had me coming into class the next day and showing everyone that this teacher works at a private school with mandatory laptops for each student, and class caps of 16 students. The students were all, “students of professors, lawyers and diplomats in the suburbs of Washington DC).

I sometimes work with students whose parents can’t feed them, let alone pay $2o,000 a year to put them in a private school. We just got a technology ‘refresh’ which involved us losing labs and dozens of computers from the school (to be replaced by wifi and the hope that students can bring their own tech) – technology support for all? Not where I live, and I work at what I’d describe as a good school in a pretty wealthy area, but we are a public school that serves everyone from trailer parks to mansions.

And I certainly have never seen an English class with (at the most) 16 students in it – double that and throw in 5-10 students are are clearly in the wrong stream; that’s what I see. In that environment crowd control is as much a part of my day as learning is.

I know they are trying to focus these videos on the specifics of what they’re talking about, but if a video production team can’t do that in a class of 30 students, 12 with IEPs, 8 who performed brain chemistry experiments at lunch and 6 who aren’t sure that they remember your name after being in your class for six weeks, what makes them think a single teacher can?

Instead of making the video to sell a book (and a dream world of magic), how about some real world candid video of what happens in real classes, warts and all? Or will marketing not ok that?