Home | PL Articles | Dec 2009

Power Down or Charge Up?

In most secondary schools, students are told to power down their technology when they arrive on campus. As they do so, students also power down a major way they access information and think.

Gone are the days when students looked up words in a paper dictionary; their natural inclination today is to use the Internet to find out anything they want to know. But the power-down policy prevents them from doing so, and in effect, encourages students to turn off parts of their brains. But perhaps even worse than the missed learning opportunities is that the power-down policy encourages students to sneak around and break rules.

In one school we recently visited, there were signs in every hallway that read, "If we see it, you lose it!" This didn't stop students from using their technology. Instead, we saw students stealthily using their hand-held devices under the table to send messages and access information. When asked about this, one of the students said, "I just make sure she [pointing to the teacher] never sees it."

The Alternative

In some schools, teachers have focused on using technology as a learning tool and regularly invite students to power up. Consider the following observation of a high school history class. As we entered, the teacher was reading aloud from a textbook. As part of his modeling, he demonstrated how he solved unfamiliar words. He used his knowledge of prefixes, suffixes, roots, and context clues to figure out what words meant. For example, when he came to the word cabinet, he thought aloud, "Are they talking about kitchen cabinets? That's what I think about when I see the word cabinet. That can't be right. I can't believe that the author would be talking about George Washington's kitchen. But wait, there's a dash there and when I read on, it says, dash, the individuals who would head these departments and advise him." As part of his modeling, the teacher stopped next at the word ratify, and the book did not offer any context clues. He used his mobile phone to send a text message to a friend, who replied saying that ratify means to approve through the legal process.

Following the modeling, while students were working in groups and the teacher was meeting with four students who struggled to explain their thinking on the exit slip the day before, a student asked what the word progeny meant. The teacher looked up to the group and asked, "Who has unlimited service and can look up progeny for Andrew?" Returning to the small group, he invited students to use Google to search for images related to the first constitutional convention. Looking at the various images they found, these students started talking with each other about the text they had been reading. They also asked their teacher questions about the clothing they were seeing and the formality of the setting. During this conversation, the teacher noticed that one of his students was veering off-track. Taking out his mobile phone, the teacher sent a quick text message to the student, who happened to have ADD/ADHD, that read, "You okay? Need me?" Upon reading the message, the student looked over at the teacher, smiled, and went back to work.

Teaching Courtesy

Encouraging the use of current technology allows students to interact with one another and the curriculum in ways that teachers of the past could have only hoped for. When asked why they don't move from a power-down policy to a power-up policy, teachers and administrators report that they believe that students will abuse the policy and not focus on learning. Well folks, that's already happening. According to the Neilsen Company (Covey, 2008), teens send 1,742 text messages per month. And USA Today reported that 25% of a teen's text messages are sent during class time (Toppo, 2009). In other words, prohibition policies aren't working. And further, those policies are not teaching students to be respectful. It is unlikely that the current power-down policies will result in a community where adults refrain from talking on their phones at restaurants or in theaters.

Before teachers and schools can use technology for instruction, it seems reasonable to suggest that students must understand how to be respectful with the tools they have. Our experience suggests that focusing on a courtesy policy and teaching students the difference between courteous and discourteous behavior is an important prerequisite for 21st century learning. (Figure 1 is a sample courtesy policy from a high school in San Diego.) Of course, having a policy and teaching students what the policy means are two different things. But the real key isn't the students; it's getting teachers to teach with this policy in place. It does no good to simply take away a student's phone--that doesn't teach him or her to use it respectfully. Rather, teachers must talk with students and give them feedback about using technology. At our school, it took several months and a lot of patience, but we're pleased to report that students now understand that they can use their technology for learning and are almost never disrespectful to teachers or peers. Gone are the days of teachers attempting to patrol the classroom for cell phone or MP3 player use. And gone are the days of principals having to discipline students about technology or collect phones and hold them during the day.

New Policies, New Learning

With a courtesy policy in place, teachers and students can use 21st century technology in their classrooms. Of course, there are significantly more tools available than we currently use in our school. And the sheer number of programs, applications, Web sites, gadgets, and portals to choose from causes us stress. We remember the first time we heard about Twitter and Ning and didn't know what they were. Our stress was reduced when we heard Marc Prensky present at a conference: he talked about the difference between nouns and verbs in relation to technology. For example, the new noun is instant message, whereas the familiar verb is communicating. We created a list of tools and categorized them according to the functions they serve (see Figure 2). In doing so, we realized that there are lots and lots of tools, but not so many functions. And the functions are things that humans have done for a long time.

For example, people like to communicate and network. The tools are different now, but the fact that we engage in these behaviors has not changed. We share information with one another, collaborate to produce new things, and listen to the words and sounds created by others. At times those technologies allow us to live vicariously through the experiences of others. And sometimes we are the ones who make it possible for others to see the world through our eyes. We saw this in action when a science teacher took students who were working on their honors project for the course on a hike to a wilderness area. They had lots of technology with them, including a global positioning device to keep track of their trek. They took photographs with their camera phones and uploaded images using Google Earth so that they would have a record of where they were when each photo was taken. The science teacher made arrangements in advance with the natural history museum in the region to create a live feed. Museum visitors were able to experience the hike in real time by viewing the photos posted on Google Earth. In addition, they sent text messages to the students, asking questions about the high chaparral desert biome that they were exploring. Several students posted reports using the microblog Twitter.

When they returned to school, the students had quite a bit of data to draw on. In addition to the field notes that they created the old-fashioned way (using paper and pencil), they had images, maps, and a record of their observations from their text messages. In addition, their teacher had assembled a video journal from the video shot by students. The students used photo images, video, and VoiceThread to create a Web album and recorded a narration of the hike for others to view and comment on. The science teacher told us, "The science is hard work like it has always been--hot temperatures, sweaty kids, tired feet. But the technology enhanced what they were learning. Science has always been about communicating. This gave them new ways to do exactly what Darwin did."

Powering Up

The idea of finding ways to make sure that students don't power down their brains when they enter a classroom is as old as formal education itself. Effective teachers have always found ways to engage students and promote their interaction with concepts and with one another, and a 21st century educator needs to work with 21st century tools and acknowledge the ways in which they promote interactions. To be sure, knowing how to use a tool without inflicting damage, literally or figuratively, is vital. But teaching students how to use these technologies to charge up their own learning is one of the most important lessons we can impart. That's the real power.

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References

Covey, N. (2008, November). Flying fingers. Retrieved from http://en-us.nielsen.com/.../issue_12/flying_fingers
Toppo, G. (2009, June 17). Survey: Many teens use phones in class to text or cheat. USA Today. Retrieved from www.usatoday.com/.../2009-06-17-cellphones-in-class_N.htm

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Douglas Fisher (dfisher@mail.sdsu.edu) and Nancy Frey (nfrey@mail.sdsu.edu) are professors of teacher education at San Diego State University and teacher leaders at Health Sciences High and Middle College in San Diego, CA.

Figure 1: Sample Courtesy Policy

Courtesy is a code that governs the expectations of social behavior. Each community or culture defines courtesy and the expectations for members of that community or culture. As a learning community, it is our responsibility to define courtesy and to live up to that definition. As a school community, we must hold ourselves and one another accountable for interactions that foster respect and trust. Discourteous behaviors destroy the community and can result in hurt feelings, anger, and additional poor choices.

In general, courtesy means that we interact with one another in positive, respectful ways. Consider the following examples of courteous and discourteous behavior.

Courteous

Discourteous

Saying please and thank you
Paying attention in class
Socializing with friends during passing periods and lunch
Asking questions and interacting with peers and teachers
Asking for, accepting, offering, or declining help graciously
Allowing teachers and peers to complete statements without interruptions
Throwing away trash after lunch
Cleaning your own workspace
Reporting safety concerns or other issues to a staff member

Using vulgar, foul, abusive, or offensive language
Listening to an iPod during a formal learning situation, such as during a lecture or while completing group work
Text messaging or talking on a cell phone during class time
Bullying, teasing, or harassing others
Corporal punishment
Hogging bandwidth or computer time
Not showing up for your scheduled appointments or not completing tasks
Failing to communicate when youâ€™re not coming to school

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Figure 2: Technology Functions With Current Tools

Searching Google Yahoo! Lycos Bing	Communicating Text messages Twitter Digg Video conference	Storing MP3 players Flash drives Servers CD/DVD
Sharing YouTube Blogs, vlogs Flickr Moodle	Collaborating Second Life Wikis VoiceThread Google Docs	Listening Podcasts iTunes Streaming media RSS feeds
Producing Garage Band iMovie Picasa	Presenting PowerPoint Keynote Wimba	Networking MySpace Facebook Ning

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Power Down or Charge Up?