Time to get wired

I told F. Scott today that I was fired up to figure out how to get laptops or ipads into the hands of my students. The more immersed I get in the Google universe (or the Googleverse as my students have suggested we call it), the more frustrated I get with the obstacles: having to take my whole class down the hall if I want them all on computers, and having to share this one lab with all of my department colleagues (which means having to sign up to use it well in advance), having a number of these computers nonfunctional on any given day... I could go on. It would be so much better if my students had access to the Googleverse (and any other web 2.0 tools I hope to use with them) at their desks in our classroom.

Up until now, I always knew I wanted laptops in my students' hands. But honestly, before now I didn't know exactly how I would use them. Now I know. I see new ways to use them every day and I get more and more frustrated that I don't have them.

I came across an article in the NYTimes this evening that helps to articulate exactly why we MUST make this shift in classrooms across the country. The longer we take to get our teaching wired, the more obsolete our teaching will become. The article explains this well:

"Even as technology spending in K-12 public education has risen steadily in the last 20 years, student performance — as measured by test results — has improved only incrementally. Meanwhile, children are proving to be wildly adaptive when it comes to using media outside school. They are fervently making YouTube videos, piloting avatars through complex game scenarios, sampling music, lighting up social networks and inventing or retooling (or purists would say, bludgeoning) language so that it better suits the text-messaging pay plan on their cellphones, only to show up to school to find cellphones outlawed, Internet access filtered and computers partitioned off from the rest of the classroom — at least in many cases. Michael H. Levine, who directs the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, acknowledges the conundrum. While there may be sound reasons behind limiting things like Internet browsing and social networking at school, he says, it does little to teach students how to live in the 21st century. It also may contribute to a broader relevancy issue. A 2006 study financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation set out to examine the reasons that almost a third of American public-high-school students fail to graduate with their class. Researchers surveyed high-school dropouts in 25 cities, suburbs and small towns across the country, where they were told again and again that school was boring. The final report recommended, among other things, that educators take steps to 'make school more relevant and engaging.'”

F. Scott helped me brainstorm an email to a key person in our school district to help me figure out how to actually get moving in this direction with my students. I think I'll enlist my students' help too...
I'll keep you posted.
M. Shelley