Frustration over the New Web

Twice in the past couple of weeks, I have tried to facilitate Web 2.0 sessions into open discussions, in an attempt to mirror read/write web styles of collaboration. Both times, including a roundtable discussion I participated in yesterday in Seattle, the discussions were almost exclusively about overcoming the barriers to implementing blogging, podcasting, and other applications. I had all kinds of little tips and tricks up my sleaves to while them with, but educators who want to use the tools as educators are deeply frustrated. They are frustrated and angry at their administrators, at their network administrators, at parents who are afraid, and at the federal government.

Three times, yesterday, I encountered a sense of real anxiety and a fear that a clock is ticking, that if things do not turn around very quickly, dire consequences lie ahead. Do you feel like a clock is ticking?

When I suggest that things should turn around, what do I mean? What does that look like?

Let me just suggest this for your reaction. Would vouchers be a bad thing, if public schools were freed up to compete? What if all public schools could act like charter schools?

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7 thoughts on “Frustration over the New Web”

  1. It certainly feels like we are missing excellent learning opportunities whilst our current curriculum is stuck in the headlights of the 90’s ! Technology evolves and changes and our curriculum and what goes on in schools should be responsive and flexible to deal with it.
    Today I did a lunchtime blogging club and one child chose to wrote on our class blog, one child chose to comment on another school’s, one child explored the visitors to our blog using Google Earth and the others looked at Bubblr.
    We just need to get more teachers making the most of these learning resources.

  2. Opening up more voucher programs so that public schools would be forced to react like charter schools (competing for students) is by no means a way of ensuring that teachers would have access to the tools they want to use on the web. A school’s culture, no matter numbers of declining or increasing enrollment, has a much more powerful force over what can and can’t be used in the classroom.

    Having taught in both charter and public schools I can tell you first hand that the schools in which Web 2.0 tools were curtailed were the ones in which parents were concerned, as you have heard recently. I’ve seen schools in which disengaged, disinterested, and otherwise absent parents couldn’t have cared less about what I did in the classroom as long as their students were passing. If anything, I had more access to social networking, bloggins, and podcasting sites in the school in which the parents simply dropped their kids off and never bothered to come into my classroom. And I’ve seen both of those kinds of attitudes in public and charter, which affirms my belief that changing a school’s culture, not taking its students away to another school, has a much deeper effect on instructional tools.

  3. Ah, the voucher card. Trying to build up the comments? Vouchers would not change the technology use aspect of public schools. Many public schools are the way they are because there are no visionaries leading them. Private schools do not have the same standardized test pressures as public schools, thus they can choose their own path to learning. I realize there can be technology and successful test scores, don’t get me wrong. I am just saying that there are so many educators afraid that a change to more tech use would not necessarily improve their test scores (because it lessens their test prep time), so they choose to stay the course. The bigger question in this case is why do we focus on test scores instead of preparing our youth for the future they will encounter? I have a friend that runs a manufacturing business locally. He says today’s kids can pass every test he gives them prior to hiring with flying colors, yet they haven’t the faintest idea how to operate even basic machinery on the production floor. They have no experience with automation, so they do not understand the concept of a process even after training.

    By the way, the charter schools here in Texas are awful. I would never want my public school to operate that way. Now if you offer us the chance to switch our standardized testing to the beginning of the year and call it diagnostic tests, then I would take you up on that. It would lessen the pressure on educators and give more direction on student needs. Teachers could then use Web 2.0 to instruct students in a collaborative manner without the fear of a looming test to sway their decisions.

    Is the clock ticking? Sure it is. Every year we choose to ignore the new technologies we send another group of kids on to the next grade a year behind. We cannot count on them to learn it correctly on their own. Yet, that is what we apparently hope they are doing.

  4. How about this…

    Public high schools not working for your child? Pull them out of the public school and send them to the Standford Online High School. When your child graduates, he or she will have up to 3 years Stanford University credit (per keynote Alan November mentioned at the CETPA conference on Thursday). The clincher is it will cost you $12,000 a year, but heck, you might be able to use a voucher to pay for half of it!

    http://epgy.stanford.edu/ohs/

    http://hic-boom-oh.blogspot.com

  5. Here’s my take….

    Being a former Social Science teacher and versed in the language of the U.S. Consitiution, I tend to approach things with the ‘Elastic Clause’ in mind.

    Teachers shall do all things that are ‘necessary and proper’ to educate the students they have in their classrooms. Literally meaning, that unless someone is telling you NO, specifically, you need to do what is right for the students you teach. And implement, implement and implement!

    What does this mean… There are ways around some of the things that Administrators and IT directors have thrown in your way. I don’t want to generalize here, but will do it here, most IT directors act in a passive-aggressive way regarding their network. They see themselves as the ‘gatekeepers,’ and will only let out what they want to let out. The truth is, that unless your disrict is spending gobs of money with an expensive filtering system, there are ways to get to the resources you will want to use with your classes. If you aren’t doing things to damage the school network, then you should do them. So, what can you do? Find sites that allow you do to the things you need to do in your class. Do your pre-use training, Digital Citizenship, online behavior standards, etc. and go for it. You also want to send communications home to the parents to let them know what you will be doing when the students are online. A good way to do this is start to collect parent e-mail addresses (parent-teacher conference season right now!) and use that as a mailing list for your blog. I always thought that would be a cool way to send home the weekly assignments, etc. in elementary school. You’ll still have to send home the paper, but once you start with the blog, the parents will start using that, because they know they can walk up to the computer and find that scrap of paper that has mysteriously dissappeared… OK… I could go on and on, but will get down off of the soap box now!

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