Month: April 2020

In response to: https://www.tvo.org/article/no-more-extensions-its-time-to-cancel-the-school-year


Nam Kiwanuka’s opinion piece on on TVO about why it’s time to cancel the school year highlights many of the problems with technology integration in Ontario’s education system.  As a computer engineering teacher in the system I’ve been continually frustrated by Ontario’s lack of focus on developing digital transliteracy in our education system.  There are no clear expectations around staff using digital tools and little to no PD around developing fluency in them.  Student digital transliteracy is at best sporadic and usually based in if they happen to luck out and get one of the minority of teachers who have personally decided to make themselves literate in 21st Century communications mediums.


Here are some of my reflexive responses to Nam’s article:


“When the government announced its plans for e-learning, I was excited.”


I was not excited, I was frustrated that weeks had gone by with no direction.  I was frustrated that at a Ministry level we evidently had no emergency planning in place at all since it looked like it was being made up on the spot.  I was frustrated that at a board level we had no idea what digital infrastructure our staff or students had at home.  That mismanagement aside, I was worried about what was about to happen.  I’ve taught elearning for over a decade and I’m well aware of the challenges involved in it.  It came as no surprise that this mandatory elearning government was going to move aggressively in that direction and I knew how unprepared the vast majority of staff and students were to make the move.

“the technology that is being used is problematic. Some of the links the teacher sends work only on certain platforms. So if you’re using a Mac, surprise (!) — you need a PC to access the video. Teachers also send scanned documents that need to be printed, filled in, and then uploaded to Google classroom. So you don’t just need computers and Wi-Fi: you need printers, too.”


There was little or no direction on how teachers should be rolling out remote learning.  Other than teachers themselves successfully re-framing this as emergency remote learning instead of elearning (because this is much more than just elearning), we were left in the dark.  With the vaguest of directions in terms of hours of work expected (which brutally ignores how students with special needs are supposed to address the work load) and many staff without the necessary tools let alone the skills needed to use them, the best that can be said about emergency remote learning is that it has cast a bright light on our digitally illiterate system.

There are digitally transliterate teachers and organizations who have for years advocated for a coherent development of these skills.  The platform dependent work Nam describes above is a great example of digital illiteracy, though I have to admire the teachers in question for trying.  It’s like watching someone who can’t read and write scrawl out chicken scratch on a page that no one else can make sense of.


Gary Stager’s principles for teaching online recognizes the limitations of the medium (and the situation) and offers clear and simple steps to making online learning work, but nothing like this was shared with teachers in Ontario.  The two weeks of silence following March Break were followed by an announcement that teachers will take it from here.  What we were taking and where we were taking it never came up.


“What kids are missing during this pandemic is not homework. What they’re missing are daily interactions with their teachers and their friends.”


The frustration here is that we are actually at a point where our technology could have done this for us, but we’re not literate enough to use it effectively.  There are a number of reasons why we can’t leverage technology in education to meet this need.


Firstly there is the digital divide in socio-economic terms.  If you fire up your video sharing and get 17 of your 28 students on there I suspect most remote learning teachers at the moment would be giddy with that participation rate, but that’s only about 60% of your students.  A number of them won’t have a device that can do it, the bandwidth to see it or the technical skill needed to put all those pieces together, which itself is predicated on access to technology they can’t afford or haven’t prioritized at home.


Let’s say we level the playing field in terms of access.  School boards across the province have done back-flips (with no direction or support from the Ministry as near as I can tell) trying to get tech out into student’s hands.  A number of years ago I worked with our student success teacher getting refurbished computers out to families in need, but it was a disaster.  If you hand people who can’t read a pile of books it doesn’t help them read any faster.  All that effort is yet another cart before the horse example of Ontario education’s backwards approach to technology integration.


The second key piece in this is that we haven’t developed the digital transliteracy in our system to make remote digital learning a possibility.  Complex tools like video chats require infrastructure and knowledge and familiarity to work.  Our board doesn’t enable video chat in our Google apps for Education system for students, so expecting familiarity with it isn’t reasonable.  It was difficult enough getting staff up and running on it.  The teachers trying to meet that important psychological need Nam mentions are taking huge risks, possibly to their careers, by going cowboy with this.


For those of us comfortable in digital mediums video chat seems like a no brainer, but it depends on complex digital transliteracy and if you don’t have it, you can’t effectively make use of it.  In that familiarity lies a hidden third layer that everyone is struggling with.  Zoom bombing is another example of digital illiteracy at work and highlights the cybersecurity and privacy considerations that our system is truly oblivious to, even as we drive people into digital spaces.  Zoom was a rushed, unencrypted communications tool that used toys to hook people into using it.  A digitally transliterate user could set passwords and lock out Zoom bombing, but oblivious users didn’t and a company unfocused on cybersecurity exacerbated the situation.


For all its problems, Zoom does address one glaring issue that many other video chats don’t.  The backgrounds you can put into Zoom would mitigate one of the major privacy concerns highlighted so well in this blog post by Alanna King.  If a government run school system requires you to video in during remote learning, what are you expected to share?  Video chats often show more detail than we’d like.  We’ve all seen just how unprepared adults have been to use video sharing tools when working remotely (digital transliteracy is remarkably poor in the general population – which is probably why education is so slow to develop it), but when a government requires minors to show the insides of their homes and themselves remotely it should sound a lot of alarm bells.


A tech-fluent teacher was trying to set up video with his students in the opening weeks of remote learning and wanted to post the videos on YouTube.  He was going to show student work on the video in a kind of lecture format.  Using digital communications to replicate classroom experiences is one of the biggest failures in education.  It shows just how stuck we are in our way of approaching learning, but that aside, are you, as a parent, comfortable with your child’s work being published on YouTube?  Are you comfortable with Google making advertising revenue from it?  In other cases I’ve seen teachers record video chats with students and publish them on YouTube.  The same questions apply, but now they include, are you comfortable with your child and your home life being published on the internet without your say so or oversight?  Are you comfortable with Google making advertising revenue from that?


We have the technology to close the gap Nam’s kids are feeling during this pandemic, but we haven’t developed the technical skills or clarified the social expectations needed to do this effectively with adults, let alone children.  That all of this technology is trotted out by tax dodging multi-national technology corporations whose main intent is to monetize your attention is just another layer we haven’t bothered to wade through.


“While it’s the right thing to keep schools closed, learning from home is not working for all Ontario students, and that’s why the government needs to follow other jurisdictions, such as New Brunswick, and cancel the rest of the school year.”


I had mixed feelings about this.  I’ve hurt myself trying to make this work.  My digital expertise is abused and ignored variously and inconsistently because I suspect it has never been valued by the system.  I’ve agitated for supports for students and staff based on this complex and evolving situation even as the system has stumbled from one inconsistency to another.  My self-selected group of digitally transliterate students are the tiny minority who volunteer to take my optional courses (I teach less than 10% of the students in my school).  I don’t have the digital transliteracy issues other teachers are battling with, but then the mental health and socio-economic problems became apparent.  Students passing out at work and clocking 50+ hour work weeks while being expected to produce hours of school work seemed cruel and inhuman. Seeing my own family bending under the stress of this ongoing crisis means I can’t do my job as effectively as I usually do as well.


Nam mentions elsewhere the lack of report cards and missed days of school this year.  I can’t help but feel that this remote learning caper is just the latest cat and mouse game being played by a government that is still very much intent on dismantling public education so it can sell it off to friends and family in the private sector.  Whether it’s driving for elearning contracts with multi-nationals or just crippling our classrooms to the point where private schools seem like a viable option, I’m exhausted by this intentional mismanagement.  Maybe pulling the plug on the whole thing is the right way out, but if it is you can bet that Lecce the cat isn’t done playing with us yet.  And I hate the idea of giving up.  Perhaps, as Nam said, this time could be better spent training and enabling our atrophied digital transliteracy instead of stressing families.

“When a board’s solution to a lack of Wi-Fi access to is to advise its students to access it via a school parking lot, maybe that should be reason enough to rethink our government’s e-learning approach.”


Even something as straightforward as this is a roll of the dice.  Our board turned it off.  Other boards have opened it up to the public.  Even with something as clear as connectivity we have no central direction or organization.  That sitting in a school parking lot is the best we can do says a great deal about how we approach the digital divide.


“We’ve also made assumptions about teachers. We assume that all teachers are tech literate and have set-ups at home to manage this work.”


Which isn’t remotely true.  I stumbled across this OECD computer skills survey a few years ago and was flabbergasted at how poor digital transliteracy is in our population.  Being at the top of that chart meant you could do simple things like take dates from an email and make an online calendar entry from them.  It wasn’t even coding or IT know-how, just simple computer use, and most people are staggeringly ignorant of it.  Teachers follow the rest of society in this regard.


I’m currently talking to other teachers in my school who are trying to navigate remote digital learning with 80+ students on a Chromebook with a 14″ screen.  My digital fluency has led me to get the tools I need to interact in digital spaces effectively, but for many others it isn’t a priority and they don’t have the tools let alone the digital transliteracy to make this work.  When the system was doing back-flips to get tech out to kids who don’t know how to use it, few efforts  were being made to do the same for staff.


Of interest in that survey, it turns out that younger  people do have marginally better computer skills, but only slightly.  One of the reasons we’ve done next to nothing in developing digital transliteracy in our schools is the asinine myth of the digital native – the idea that if a child is born in a time when a technology is in use, they’ll magically know how to use it – you know, like we all knew how to drive because cars existed in our childhood.  This kind of nonsense has been used as an excuse to do nothing for decades now.  I teach computer technology and I can tell you that students are as habitual in their use of technology as anyone else.  They might be cocky and comfortable with laying hands on tech, but move them out of their very narrow comfort zone of familiar hardware and software and they are as lost as any eighty year old.

This crisis has shown me things I never thought I’d see:  proudly digitally illiterate teachers participating in video staff meetings and kids performing feats of endurance for atrophied student minimum wages while being called heroes by the guy who reduced their minimum wage.


After the year we’ve had (and I won’t even get into how our family has had to fight cancer and limp along on partial salaries for months on end waiting for anyone to help us), I think I’m ready to put it down, I only wish this government would too, but I know they won’t.


I said it in response to Alex Couros on Twitter and I’ll say it again.  Maybe the best thing that will come of this is that we’ll start to recognize what literacy is in 2020 and begin to integrate technical and media digital transliteracy into our curriculum for all students and teachers.  Given time, we could develop a system that is resilient and able to respond to a challenge like remote learning effectively and quickly – completely unlike how this has gone down.

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Emergency remote teaching during this COVID19 pandemic is turning out to be quite unsustainable.  I staggered to the end of last week feeling stretched to the point of breaking by the endless administrative push to make arbitrary and pedagogically suspect Ministry of Education remote learning expectations happen.


Three hours per class per week might have sounded like a reasonable though random expectation when it was dreamed up a few weeks ago, but it raises a lot of questions.  Here are some from me in no particular order:




1) Basic Needs Have to Come Before Curriculum


How can we set an arbitrary time limit on acceptable work when we’re ignoring basic needs?


Trauma causes a disruption in the foundations need to bring students to learning.  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs came about in the 1950s.  Abraham Maslow, the psychiatrist who invented the concept, uses it to show how complex human thinking, like learning, can’t happen without basic needs being met.


The current emergency situation has damaged our ability to mitigate the shortcomings students may be experiencing while trying to learn at home.  Those students who counted on our school’s breakfast program to be fed aren’t being at the moment.  Those students who depended on our developed one on one special education support services in school aren’t getting them at the moment.  Even students who may have enjoyed physiological security before the pandemic shutdown might now be experiencing scarcity for the first time as parents are suddenly laid off.


With all of that under consideration, dropping blanketed, mandated hourly expectations on all students regardless of their circumstances is callous to an inconceivable degree.  Where is the compassion?


The ‘this isn’t elearning or even remote learning, it’s emergency response learning” doesn’t seem to have registered with the people who run things, though it certainly has with all the front line education workers in Ontario who are trying to force this square peg into an infinite variety of unique, never before seen student learning circumstances.


I was so wound up about this on Thursday night after a week of communicating with students and parents in various states of crisis that I was up at midnight trying to think my way out of it on Prezi:

That we’ve also piled transliteracy expectations that many staff and students don’t have on top of a decline in the basic needs required to learn makes the circumstances even more untenable.  There are no skills based requirements and next to no mandatory professional development for teachers in becoming digitally transliterate.  It only happens with our students when they’re lucky enough to get a teacher who spends their own time and money on developing that critical 20th Century literacy.


A coherent, skills based, mandatory approach to digital transliteracy should be a priority when we return.  How this is all going down could be significantly different if we were approaching this with digitally transliterate and enabled staff and students.  We certainly wouldn’t have wasted the first three weeks trying to find out if our staff and students even have ICT technology at home before moving into remote learning using tools most of them don’t know how to use effectively.




2) Why is differentiation always the first thing to die when the system decides to act unilaterally?


Three hours for one student isn’t three hours for another. Are teachers being expected to design individual work for the dozens upon dozens of students they are trying to direct through remote learning?


Let’s say Maslow’s basic needs were somehow addressed and we ensured that every student in Ontario has food, shelter and the other basic needs required to climb the hierarchy to a point where they can focus on learning.  We didn’t come close to addressing it when times were good (actually, the government in charge is actively working against it), so doing it during a pandemic emergency seems even more unlikely, but let’s say we manage it.  Let’s say we also suddenly have staff and students who are digitally transliterate (again we’re miles away from this, but let’s pretend).  Even in that perfect Ontario the three hours per week per course per week expectation would be startlingly insensitive to how students learn.  Wouldn’t it be great if people were all the same?  It’s so hard to manage otherwise!  It might have been easy to trot out a suggestion like that, but 3 hours of work is different for pretty much every student, and trying to assess that through atrophied and inconsistent digital technologies is nearly impossible, even for a digitally transliterate teacher.

I have one gifted, ASD student who had to back off on the third year university equivalent artificial intelligence project she was working on remotely because she doesn’t have the mathematics foundations needed to comprehend it (she was worried this would hurt her average – it won’t).  I have another gifted ASD student whose anxiety has been triggered by this pandemic to such a degree that he’s unable to do anything (he’s also worried about it hurting his average – it won’t, though that’s me, not system-think).  That’s happening with two students with similar IEPs!*

* IEPs are individual education plans that all special education students have, though I think every student should have one since they’re all special and many less fortunate students don’t have parents with the resources to weather the IEP process even when they should have one.  In Ontario even our spec-ed support is predicated on privilege.  We had to put out thousands in testing to get my son’s ASD diagnosis accepted.  If you can’t afford that, you can’t access the support.


Now think about the other three dozen IEPs I’m juggling, but because I’m not an insensitive jerk I treat every student like they have an IEP because you never know what’s happening in a student’s life.  Trauma like divorce, a death in the family or parental loss of income can negative influence a student’s learning at any time.  Like the kid whose dad emailed me this week in response to my contacting them about a lack of  weekly engagement (we’re required to pester people every week if they’re not engaged).  His grandmother just passed from the pandemic, but this interfered with our systemic 3hr/course/week mandate and the systemic response we’ve built to force, um, I mean support it.

I have over 60 students this semester.  Others have over 90!  But bigger class sizes are coming because we’re about to agree to a contract under duress that further deteriorates learning environments by cutting funding and forcing more kids into each class – evidently the pandemic emergency means it’s ok for our government to force (another) illegal contract on us using this emergency as the excuse, but I digress.


Am I supposed to custom design 3 hours of work for each one of my remote learners?  Or just throw what three hours of work would look like for a fictitious ‘average’ student (there are no average students in a pandemic) at everyone?  Even if it might take some of them 10 hours?  Even if some of them can’t do it at all in these circumstances?


Three hours per course per week is the worst kind of reductionist system-think.  The project work I set up for my students is based on self reporting, but still has expected outcomes because the way this is going, we’ll be asked to assign grades to work, and if I don’t have that work then a student’s grade will suffer.  The people who set this as a requirement shouldn’t be working in education.


OSSTF has suggested pass fail, which is a step in the right direction.  I’m going to take it a step further, grades or pass/fail.  No one is going to have this situation diminish their grades, period.  It would be nice if the Ministry mandated that, but if no one making the big bucks can make a compassionate decision that acknowledges the mess that this is, I will.





3) and what about the labour abuse?


If a student is working absurd hours, why are they still being held to arbitrary expectations around time spent in class?  Why is no one looking to labour abuse with Ontario’s students?

It’s the ministry of work now. Labour sounded too dignified.

The education system didn’t just passively let this student labour abuse happen, it caused it to happen when it suspended classes.  I’m happen to be teaching three graduating classes this semester.  I’m hearing from many of them that they are working more than forty hours per week, in several cases over 50 hours per week in their ‘heroic’ emergency services wage slave jobs.  I had one fifteen year old tell me he just came off a 44 hour work week and was sorry he couldn’t do the remote learning because he kept falling asleep while attempting it.  I’m supposed to put ‘does not meet expectations’ in his work for week three of remote learning because he’s less than three hours on the clock.  I’m also supposed to bother him and his parents (who have been laid off during the pandemic shutdown) every week asking why he isn’t meeting remote learning expectations.


Students in Ontario make an even more miserable minimum wage than the Fordnation reduced adult minimum wage.  He likes to call them heroes, but he won’t pay them any more to be heroes during an emergency.   He just offered a smaller professional group that doesn’t grapple with minimum wage a raise, but not the kids who we took out of school in order to protect them (or at least not be liable for them) so they could go and work in much more COVID-spreadable minimum wage jobs.  Step one would be to realize we didn’t shut down schools to protect students, we did it to protect system liability.  Step two would be to ensure all students are rewarded for their ‘heroic’ efforts.  I think a $20/hour minimum student wage during the pandemic for critical service work is a start.  Step three would be to forgive any student working more than the 28 hour a week student limit.  I don’t imagine any of those things will happen though.  I’m left wondering if many of these students are still being paid student minimum wage, because over 28 hours a week they should at least be making adult minimum wage.  Betcha they aren’t.  If that isn’t the very definition of child labour abuse, I don’t know what is.  It’s shameful.


***

Being asked to deal with student learning difficulties, socio-economic status and even their psychological challenges isn’t new for me as a teacher, but being expected to be their main point of contact through remote learning for all of these things isn’t just overwhelming, it’s emotionally exhausting.  I’m occasionally reduced to tears of frustration by the school system, but last week was a new peak – not that teacher burnout is on anyone’s radar.


When a colleague finally forwarded an inactive student to admin for support the other week the first thing they were asked to do was contact them in more ways.  I’m sure everyone who isn’t trying to communicate on a strict weekly schedule of expectations with a many classes of students through the limited bandwidth of phones and online communications is very busy having meetings (I was dragged into no less than 4 last week and I’m a front line teacher), but those of us in the trenches would appreciate some immediate pickup rather than an attempt to off load even more onto us.


While I’m spending my own money on technology, heating, electricity, internet, telephone and burning through more sanity than I should in order to ‘be the education system’ for the sixth week in a row, I’m told that we now have a tentative contract because students need stability at a time like this.  I’m not sure why they didn’t need stability last year, or why I had to take another strike day pay cut in the face in order to end up agreeing to what was being offered then anyway, but that looks like how it’s going to go.  After a year of outright abuse which has included illegal bargaining (good faith bargaining is protected in the Canadian Charter of Rights & Freedoms, and there has been little of that this year) and repeatedly demeaning our profession, this government (when they aren’t making up fictitious stories about supporting students in remote learning) are going to use this pandemic to increase class sizes and cut learning supports.  We haven’t heard the details yet.  I’m sure we’ll get a very streamlined process designed to force compliance.  It’s hard to work in a system where trust has been compromised in so many places.  I just have to remember what’s most important: don’t let it hurt the kids, though at some point I’ll have taken so many bullets that I don’t think I won’t be able to take any more.

It hasn’t been a great week three in remote learning during a pandemic.

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