The lone tweet from the school

While I was living in Tampa I had the opportunity to teach at an inner city school for about two months. It was the last two months of the semester and the teacher had an emergency out of state so I was called in and took the class through the end of the year.

I didn't have a lot of experience working with sixth graders before and especially ones from inner city poverty plagued families. It was a very eye opening experience for me and one I hope I'll never forget.

One of the most interesting insights in this 2 months in a inner city school for me was how the school used technology. As schools, especially here in Florida, focus more and more on Math, Science, Engineering, and Technology I was shocked to see how little any of these were used in the classroom.

Know I must explain that I taught a social sciences class so of course there would not be as much engineering or math in the those classes but there is no reason why technology and science aren't brought into them.

I had the freedom to bring in new lesson plans, due to the fact that the previous teacher had neglected to use or teach the required material. I quickly put a request in and got a projector and ELMO. Within a few days I had redid the desks, integrated videos into EVERY lesson, had students bringing in books and other items from the library and created a more hands on approach.

I quickly realized that cell phones were banned at the school (a popular rule at public schools that I disagree with but understand the logic behind it) and was amazed at how little most of these students actually knew about online social networking, cell phone usage, and other important skills needed in the 21st Century.

I was soon using facebook, twitter, and google earth in the lessons. Of course most of this was blocked on the schools computers so I was having to use my cell phone's web browser and the ELMO to actually do these things. The class was excited to come and actually have interactive lessons where we might send a person in another country a tweet asking them about that place or seeing a person's vacation pictures from a foreign country as we studied that country.

I had the other teachers talking and was soon helping them do similar projects in their classes. Sadly the end of the year came upon on quickly and my duty at the school was over. (I must say that many of the students who at the beginning of the two months couldn't even point out where Florida was on a map at the end of the semester could tell you in-depth information about many larger countries and information about the Latin American countries that have a influence upon Tampa's culture.)

I share all this to show how technology is currently discouraged in public schools and how instead it should be brought into the classroom. I see no reason why every school in the country is not on Skype, is not tweeting, is not on facebook. In the midst of my time at the middle school the swine flu epidemic broke out causing some other schools in the county to be forced to close. I was following the county school district on twitter and knew, often times before the other teachers, the latest information on what schools were being closed.

If we expect to educate our students to be successful in a 21st Century workplace we need to teach them how to be abreast with the latest ever evolving technology. I encountered schools that had little contact and even smaller amount s of understand of what social networking really was. Instead I found teachers encouraging students to delete their facebooks, not tweet anything and pretty much live in fear of the internet.

The teachers would joke with me saying I was going to be the first teacher to just tweet my lessons but the underlining fact was still there, that many of them openly didn't "get" what the facebook, myspace, hi5, twitter, digg, or any of the other mainstream internet was. The other joke was that this was the only inner city class in the world that has facebook, twitter, and flicker all used in the daily lessons, sadly this isn't far from the truth.

That was why I was so happy to see that Purdue is encouraging an integration of these newer technologies into the classroom.



I hope to see the same from out public schools sooner than later. Even if cell phones are still banned (which hate to break it to anybody who thinks differently but every student in classroom has a cell phone on them and most are already texting in class.) there could be a touch screen modular built into the desks. I'm imagining a laptop style learning center that each student uses throughout the class. I think in the long run this would be cheaper than the smart-boards (which in my opinion is the most overrated and under-preforming technology I have ever seen), continually updating the books, and helps teach different students in different ways. I loved the classrooms where each student had a computer and class chats were on each screen. The teacher can monitor the screens at their desk but I would prefer the teacher to have tablet PC so they could be able to monitor each screen while also moving about the room.

I realize none of this discussion is new but I think that for too long we have just said "oh we need technology is the classroom" and have put a computer in the corner, or a smartboard on the wall, or an ELMO in the room. Instead we need to say "What technology will these students need to know and how can we use that technology in the classroom?" That isn't overpriced webcams or interactive boards, its Internet technology. Sure I would love to see every desk in every classroom be a Microsoft Surface product but right now that's not the finical reality but there is no reason why twitter or flicker can't be in the classroom.

I just hope that our public schools are serious when they say they will become competitive in global market and the best way to see if they are is to see how they integrate technology.