Happy fall! Welcome back to school! I am excited to be back in school and think of all the possibilities of what could happen in this academic year. I am pumped up to be inside the field and sometimes outside of my comfort zone. I can't wait to learn about new things happening in education as a whole and educational impacts being made in individual schools. I am very happy to hear about the technology advancements being made throughout our field, but also have some concerns about them.
I had the pleasure of hearing a talk by Peter Pasque who is the Google integrationist for staff and students at Skyline High School. The faculty truly dedicated themselves to a new technology initiative when they created the school not too long ago. The curriculum is based around google integration and Student Learning Networks. Each student at Skyline is required to create their own webpage which will digitally contain all of their school work. Education is changing as we know it - excuses like 'my dog ate my homework' won't work anymore because there is always a digital copy readily available. Another perk to this initiative is that the students are the owners of their work - they choose when their instructors can access and edit it, and they choose when to revoke those privileges. They are the boss of their site. Additionally, the students have a digital reference library of the work they created throughout high school for access in the future. If they ever want to put all of their work on a resume, it is already all put together. I really love the idea of organizing our students online lives, and doing it in a way that benefits both them and their teachers.
While all of this is great and fun, I still see cracks where disadvantaged students are likely to fall. Yes, it is great that every student has to put their work online in order to organize it, but what about the student that does not have internet access or a computer at home? It is not easy for him to have access to the same about of flexibility and creativity when creating this online portfolio, as it is for other, more advantaged students. Will it benefit this student after they graduate? Will they be rushing to the library to remember the organization and papers they wrote for English 9? I don't think so.
**If you want to check out more information on the Skyline technology initiative, you can get it here.
Perhaps a one-to-one technology initiative would be more beneficial, one might think. If each kid could just get a device that worked, maybe then the equity piece would be less glaring. Unfortunately, it's not that easy. The school district in which I am student teaching was lucky enough to receive a grant to help them fund a one-to-one program. All teachers have already received school-assigned chromebooks, and students will begin to receive them in January. By the end of the academic year, in June 2014, all students will have a chromebook assigned to them. Great! Solves the problem, right? Nope. Google chromebooks are unique in the fact that they do not have a hard drive. When it is turned on, there are no programs to install and get fired up. It simply starts up in a matter of seconds. It is light, and it will never have 0% of space left. "How is this possible?" you might ask. Well, the chromebook is essentially a browser. All it has on it is google chrome. The owner is expected to use google apps to complete all of their work - google docs, excel sheets, presentation (their version of powerpoint), etc. This would be okay if the students had internet! I don't think the student without access to a computer would have access to internet readily available. Without internet access, the chromebook is completely useless which furthers the equity problem.
Lastly, I will raise an issue I find with both the Skyline initiative and the one at my student-teaching high school. Some may call me crazy, others may think I am a cynic, and I don't know if I disagree with either of those allegations However, I seem to find a problem with the fact that both programs require the students giving their information to google. I know that technology is growing, and soon no one will have any privacy due to internet, but ti still irks me that kids who are not allowed to vote, not allowed to choose whether or not they go to school, and sometimes not even allowed to drive yet, by the law, are being forced to give their personal information to a company that has been accused of selling user information. I think that if a student is going to choose to put all of their personal information on the internet, then they should have that choice. However, I do not see how a student who did not want to do so would get around either of these policies.
I realize no system can be perfect, especially when it is, like technology integration is, so new. I understand that high schools are doing their best to fill the needs of their students and provide the best learning environment for today's society and culture, but I think there are major problems associated with the current "solutions." Still, I love hearing about the different ways different schools choose to go about this, and for that reason, I am thrilled I was able to interact with Peter Pasque.
Your point about requiring students to sign up with Google is interesting, and one I hadn't thought of before. I mean, I personally don't mind using Google, but I can see how some students or parents might be wary of the mega-site. That also made me think about how not all students CAN use Google... being in a middle school, technically most students are too young to sign up. That doesn't mean they don't - it seems there are a lot of middle schoolers these days who were born in 1900. Either way, it's relevant to note the drawbacks of relying on Google (or any other resource).
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