What is Google doing to our Brains?

As a result of using the Internet, technology, Google, etc our brains are changing.  Our lifestyle, the way we do business, the way we learn, and the way we communicate are also changing. Yes, our attention spans are changing, but our global society is also changing.  We have to manage more now than we did 50 years ago.  We are trying to multi-task and according to the research, we can't.  Are the common pulls on our attention responsible for students not being ready for college?  Yes, many students would rather watch Youtube videos while texting than read a complex text such as Thoreau's Walden, but is the fact that they are doing these things responsible for their lack of focus?

Mark Bauerlein tries to blame the inability to read complex texts on technology in his article Too Dumb for Complex Texts published in Educational Leadership in 2010.  While he cites evidence from the ACT scores and college freshman grades indicating that students aren't ready for college, I am not convinced that it is because of student technology use.  Could it also be because this generation has only had to take standardized assessments to progress to the next level? Could the fact that our economy and industry are changing, but we continue our industrial model school system.  Could it be because our family and social networks have changed and thus the attitudes toward school have changed?  Have students even been taught how to engage with and read these texts?  Are they given opportunities throughout high school to grapple with the complex ideas presented in these texts and demonstrate the ability to understand and apply the ideas they learn?  Are they provided a teacher with enough time and training to give adequate feedback on writing, challenge their thinking, and hold them accountable for reading and discussing the texts?  In a typical public high school a teacher can have from between 80 and 150 students.  How can that one teacher possibly give feedback and discuss these ideas with the kids?

Technology is not the problem nor is it to blame for these changes. According to the 2010 Kaiser Foundation study, teens spend an average over 7.5 hours using technology per day, but who is letting them do that? Who is failing to teach our teenage generation how to use these tools wisely? The number of vehicle deaths have increased because of cars.  We still use cars and don't blame the cars for the problems the humans who use them cause. I see using the technology tools in the same light. The technology tools are here, but we can choose how we use them.  It is our responsibility to use these tools to improve how we think and how we learn.  Part of the problem is that the technology has changed so quickly that social etiquette and norms are struggling to keep up. It is time to stop blaming the tool, and start focusing on how we can engage our students, provide a stimulating and relevant curriculum, and offer the opportunity for success in our world.

Baeurlein, M. (2010). Too dumb for complex texts. Educational Leadership, 68(5), 28 - 33. 

Dretzin, R. & Rushkoff, D. (2010). Digital nation: life on the virtual frontier. Public Broadcasting system. Retrieved from: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/. 

Rideout, V., Foller, U., & Roberts, D. (2010) Generation M2: media in the life of 8-18 year olds. Kaiser Family Foundation, Retrieved from: http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/8010.pdf.

How do we assess if students are learning?  A common answer is if students are passing tests or not. Dr. Douglas Reeves, founder of The Leadership and Learning Center challenges this notion.  He says "developing better tests of student learning in the 21st century is as futile as attempting to find a faster horse and buggy would have been in the 20th century"(2010).  Our traditional assessments don't let us know how much a student has learned as much as they allow us to sort students.  Sorting students will not help our students become successful in the 21st century economy. To measure student learning in the 21st century Reeves suggests we assess students in three ways: 

   1. In variable rather than standardized conditions

   2. As teams rather than as individuals

   3. With assessments that are public rather than secret

 

By focusing on these three areas we are able to measure growth in a variety of relevant skills beyond content acquisition. In fact, content acquisition becomes a minimum expectation and foundation for learning in the 21st century.  School used to be the only place a person could come to learn new content.  Tests that simply tested content acquisition made sense and were valuable.  Now content is widely available and the purpose of schools is shifting.  Our young learners must learn how to navigate through the content and become digitally literate.  Chris Dede, a professor at Harvard University offers eleven necessary skills to develop digital literacy.  In his model students must experiment with their surroundings, be able to "separate signals from noise", communicate effectively, and see diversity as an opportunity. Here is a graphic representation of Chris Dede's Digital Citizenship skills. 

Since the school's purpose is no longer simply to teach concepts, more emphasis in assessment then becomes focused on what students can do with their knowledge, including working in teams to solve problems.  Shifting from standardized conditions to variable conditions allows for flexibility in what is assessed. When many students were preparing to work in a factory conforming to schedules and assessing basic knowledge was valuable.  Now, these skills are irrelevant.  The current students will create their jobs and innovation will be an expectation.  How can innovation be assessed in a standardized condition when every assessor is trained to look for the same qualities in an answer?  

Our current students will need to be able to contribute to a group more-so than ever before.  In the 20th Century a great deal of our citizens needed to work as part of a team and simply fulfill their roles.  Those days are over. Our current students will need to be able to collaborate with a group to create products and solve problems.  Assigning grades and sorting students is no longer relevant because our teams will only be as strong as our weakest citizens.  We can no longer rely on a few individuals to serendipitously acquire skills such as problem solving, creativity, and innovation, but rather we must expect all of our citizens will learn these skills. 

Finally, public assessments provide validity to assignments.  When the audience is expanded beyond a single teacher, the quality of work increases because the projects mean something more than a letter grade.  Students taking tests to assess content matter sends the message that learning content is the most valued skill in our education system.  Perhaps teams are competing for a proposal for a company.  The assessment can occur throughout the project and thus students are able to process their feedback and apply it directly to the project. A vision is that students would then come to value and seek out feedback because it helps them grow and get better. 

Review of A New Culture of Learning

For a grad school class I am taking we were assigned to read A New Culture of Learning by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown. This book explains that three fundamental exercises: Play, Questioning, and Imagination are vital for learning to occur in our classrooms.  They argue the need to incorporate the principles into our classrooms is due to the fact that our world is changing and that innovation will be the key to a child's success in their future.  After the first few chapters I was intrigued with the ideas of "cultivating minds" of the learners in our classrooms and setting up learning experiences to encourage collectives to form.  I found myself unconvinced by the end of the book that their ideas are new or applicable to a classroom.
Most of their ideas remind me of John Dewey's work and other experiential education advocates.  Their description of tactic versus explicit learning made me think of Dewey's work that was written a hundred years ago, yet the authors failed to mention him or use his work to support their points.  I whole-heartedly agree that experiential education is the right choice for our classrooms, but I am still searching for a way to set up more experiential experiences and still maintain a high expectation for content understanding.  We still need people to know things.  Doctors need to know the symptoms of diseases for the patients they will see and understand the treatment for the disease.  Lawyers need to know and understand the law.  Service industry personnel need to know and understand the information and skills necessary to perform their jobs.  In many instances the skills needed for the professions in our world aren't changing and at what point do we just accept that a kid needs to memorize 2 + 2 is four?

Thomas and Brown also spend a considerable part of their book arguing that games such as World of Warcraft offer the youth and adult communities opportunities for learning.  Although they provide examples of the collective learning that takes place within these games I find myself unconvinced that playing these games for hours on end are a good use of time for our citizens.  I kept waiting for Thomas and Brown to provide evidence of the gamers using the skills they learned within the games to contribute to the actual world community (rather than only their virtual community) in a positive and productive way but that evidence was never presented.  The negatives of kids getting addicted to these games and the high correlation of depression with devoting a great deal of time to playing the games makes the possible positives of the learning that occurs (but maybe not even transferred) within the game not worth it to me.


I will implement some of the ideas Thomas and Brown presented in their book.  I specifically liked their reflections about feedback in that the feedback should lead to a desire to improve.  I plan to incorporate this concept in my classroom this year by using feedback with students not just to indicate whether they got the correct answer or not, but also to challenge them to improve in many skills a science class lends itself to.

Overall, I felt that I was reading a lecture about not lecturing.  If play, questioning, and imagination are the keys to learning, how could the authors have used this format in their book to demonstrate their point?  If knowing, making, and playing are vital skills, then what journey could the authors have taken me on so that I could know, make, and play so that I could move forward with not just explicit knowledge (as they indicate is not valuable), but rather an experience with tactic knowledge.  I wish that this book had relevant examples for how to implement their ideas about experiential education into classrooms.  Although I agree with many of the concepts in the book, I could not recommend it to a colleague for the many things I found myself wanting from this book that weren't there.

Source: 
 Thomas, D., & Brown, J. S. (2011). A new culture of learning, cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Createspace.

Digital Citizenship

"Michael Rich, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston who directs the Center on Media and Child Health, said that with media use so ubiquitous, it was time to stop arguing over whether it was good or bad and accept it as part of children’s environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.”     - The Journal 


According to a 2009 Keiser Family Foundation study, kids are spending an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes per day consuming media (Generation M2 Report, 2009).  This means students are spending around 53 hours per week watching videos, television, surfing the Internet, playing video games, texting their friends, commenting on Facebook, listening to music, watching Youtube videos, and much more.  This is more time than an adult spends at a full time job during the week. The internet is growing and changing more rapidly than I (or most of us I suspect) can wrap our minds around.  Because of this students find themselves facing different challenges than previous generations have faced.  


Here are just a few of the challenges kids currently face:
1/3 of kids have been victims of cyber bullying (Commonsense media, 2012).  A kid no longer has to worry about dealing with bullies at school, but now kids can post harmful words and pictures on public sites such as Facebook.  Kids can find themselves receiving hateful text messages. 


1/3 of Kids have sexted which means they have sent or received inappropriate photos of themselves or messages about their explicit behavior (ABC News, 2010).


23% of kids (31% of males) report feeling addicted to video games.  They are not making this up.   A study by PLoS One has found that the same regions of the brain that causes drug addiction are the same ones that are used when kids play video games (Sevege, 2012).

Kids can purchase items impulsively through the internet. 


Kids are constantly asked to provide personal information to companies. 


Colleges and Employers check digital reputations to make acceptance decisions.  We live in an age where what a kid posts on the internet at 14 can have lifelong consequences.  

According to the 2009 Keiser Family Foundation  there is a high correlation between heavy media use and depression, and there is a high correlation between low media use and happiness and satisfaction (Generation M2 Report, 2009).

Here is a document Microsoft created highlighting many of the challenges kids face in our connected generation. 

Thinking about this is daunting and makes me glad I grew up in the 90's and didn't have to face any of this.  What can we do?  We can incorporate digital citizenship into our curriculum.  According to Ann Collier, the editor of Net Family News.org says "digital Citizenship is "critical thinking and ethical choices about the content and impact on oneself, others, and one's community of what one sees, says, and produces with media, devices, and technologies" (Collier, 2011)  We can teach students how to use technology for empowerment rather than only as entertainment. We can teach them how to sift through the vast amount of information on the internet and how to cite sources properly.  We can teach them how to responsibly create their digital footprint, and how to manage their time in a healthy way.  We can help them learn the permanent consequences of pressing send and how what they write on the internet or in texts is written in pen not pencil. We can teach students that cyber bullying is real and that sexting isn't safe. 

·         

 I have created an action plan for the boarding school community I work at, and I have attached it below.  This is a video for the administrators of our Health, Wellness, and Community Life (HWCL) curriculum at our school that demonstrates the need for these topics to be included in our HWCL curriculum)




 

Digital Citizenship Action Plan
Digital Citizenship Contract by Andrew Churches from edorigami
Digital Citizenship Student Survey
Digital Citizenship Scenarios


Links
Does Internet Addiction Change Teens Brains?

Keiser Family Foundation Generation M2 Report
     Want a quick summary of their findings?  Click here.

I Keep Safe

Common Sense Media

New York Times: Teaching about the Web includes Troublesome Parts

New York Times: If Your Kid is Awake they are Probably Online


Text unto Others as You Would Have Them Text Unto You


Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship

Sources:

ABC News. (2009, March 13). The consequences of sexting [Video webcast]. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/consequences-sexting-7080436 

Common Sense Media (2012). Stand Up to Cyberbullying. Retrieved July 28, 2012 http://www.commonsensemedia.org/cyberbullying

I Keep Safe (2012). Sexting. Retrieved from http://www.ikeepsafe.org/articles/sexting/.  

Keiser Family Foundation. (2009). Report: generation M2: media in the lives of 8-18-year-olds.  Retrieved July 28, 2012, from http://www.kff.org/entmedia/8010.cfm

Sevege, Jenn (2012). Does internet addiction change teens brains? Retrieved July 28, 2012 from http://www.mnn.com/health/fitness-well-being/blogs/does-internet-addiction-disorder-change-teens-brains

Special thanks to the following sites for photos for the video: 
Http://markdownworkin.com
http://stopthehateofcyberbullying.blogspot.com
http://uthmag.com/cyber-bullying/
http://n4bb.com
http://buzzaboutgames.com
http://Marketingallinclusive.com
Http://earnmoney-veryeasy.blogspot.com
http://chiropracticunderground.com
http://analyhighschool.org
http://Bybassfacebookfanpages.com
http://Clevland.cbs.com
http://writeforhr.com

Which Technology Tool to Use?

Trying to find technology tools to try in a classroom can be incredibly overwhelming. Our life as educators are incredibly busy and time is one thing we never seem to have enough of.  Therefore investing the energy and time in finding tools and then developing new projects seems to be something we can put off.  This seems contrary to our hope for students in that we want them to be life long learners, and yet we ourselves can be reluctant to keep up with the latest research and tools in our field.  As I reflect about this, I think that it might be part of why many kids fail to become lifelong learners. The kids watch us and follow what we do way more often than what we say.  If we demonstrate that WE are lifelong learners by staying up-to-date by learning and incorporating the new tools in our practice I wonder if the kids will be more receptive and more apt to follow our example.

So where to start?  First off, why should we take some of the fun in planning lessons and experiences away from the kids?  The internet and the many applications make it easier than ever before to give kids control over their own learning.  We could develop a question, topic, or problem and challenge the kids to collaborate and use a new technology tool in their answer, lesson, or solution.  Giving control to the kids seems really scary though.  In my education I was taught to have clear learning goals for the kids, and the learning outcomes from this method seem a little messy and more difficult to measure. Therefore we need to redefine what we want the kids to know, and it has to start by being more than content knowledge. David Dunbar from the Masters School in New York asked me "why do we love planning and not grading?"  I have been mulling over this question and I believe giving kids the opportunity to take ownership in using the technology and designing experiences and projects will have them create things I can't wait to read and watch and offer feedback about.

I recently watched a video produced by RSA about what motivates us.  I was shocked to find out that offering incentives such as money actually hinders people from doing good work.  Studies have repeatedly shown that when money is offered to try to get people to do better and more thoughtful work that the exact opposite occurs - they do worse with the incentive.  Scientists have found that people are motivated by three things:

             1. Autonomy
             2. A desire to improve
             3. Work that has a purpose



This could be why "paying" kids with high grades doesn't stimulate better, more creative, or more thoughtful work.  Instead we as educators need to make the work meaningful, give them opportunities and feedback in how they can improve, and the autonomy to create and have ownership over their learning. If this happens we no long have students in our classrooms but rather a collective formed by learners. Technology makes this dream more of a reality than ever before.

With this in mind I have created a Prezi to highlight some of the tools available and how they can be used by teachers and learners. Everything about our society is changing because of technology.  Learning both in and out of our classrooms can not only be improved but rather transformed by utilizing the tools available. Conversations can be extended beyond the class period, and the kids have the opportunity to present their work to their peers and the world.  Their words, videos, virtual posters, and stories matter more now because their work is valuable and they are accountable to more people than only their teacher their self. The teacher and learners more so than ever before can harness the power of technology and be able to form a collective and contribute in meaningful ways. 

Tech Resources for the Teacher and Learner on Prezi

I recently ran across a blog written by Sylvia Tolisano.  She has created a chart of resources that are organized by various roles in the classroom based on Alan November's Digital Farm model.

This is not an inclusive list, and in a few months to next year it will be out of date.  Subscribe to professional education blogs and have new feeds sent directly to an RSS Google Reader feed. Some examples of some professional blogs:
                             
                                         www.langwitches.org/blog/                          
                                    www.thefischbowl.blogspot.com
                                              www.pernilleripp.com
                                       www.davidwarlick.com/2cents

Joining a Professional Learning Network can help us as educators keep up with the latest tools and research available in our field.  Being a part of one can also help filter through the new tools and information on the internet.

                                                       The Educators PLN
                                                Edutopia's advice on PLNs
                           A Slideshare about Professional Learning Networks
                                           A blog about creating a PLN

Resources:

Pink, Dan., (2010) Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc.  RSA Animate.

Thomas, D., & Brown, J. S. (2011). A new culture of learning, cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. CreateSpace.

The door is open, why can't I walk through?

So my summer of enlightenment continues and I find myself with more questions than answers. I have opened the door to the world of educational technology tools, but at the same time I am hesitant to go through. It looks so fancy inside and I want to enter, but some lingering questions are holding me back. I am being held back for the same reasons I am hesitant to let my sixteen-month-old daughter play with my iPad or watch television. My hesitation is mostly coming from my fear of living even more in a world without tactile stimulation. There is something really nice about writing on paper and feeling a book in my hands, even though I sit here reading articles and books on my iPad. Working math problems out on paper without a calculator is empowering and I worry the kids are not getting this experience by using calculators at such an early age. The kids think I am crazy when I tell them calculators are not allowed in my physics class and in the past few years I have witnessed the damaging effects of students relying on calculators instead of their own brain. Think about the experience of writing or receiving a handwritten note.  Why are more and more schools incorporating gardening and farming into the curriculum? There is something so great but I can't describe about "getting your hands dirty" that makes for a powerful learning experience for the kids. By integrating more and more technology into our lives and curriculum are we taking away these "human" experiences from the kids? Plus, using technology more promotes the lack of physical activity.  Physical activities such as exercise has been scientifically shown to improve the mental capabilities more so than just stretching your brain, so how can I jump on this technology train knowing that it might lead to even more sitting around and just using your brain and not your body as well?

One of my esteemed colleagues constantly reminds me that the content in her class isn't really important, but "rather the habits of mind" that are developed from doing the work is her main goal. At what point are we doing a disservice to the kids by not expecting them to sit down and do some challenging work that might not be initially interesting to them? They learn patience, resilience, and many other important lessons that come with the struggle of learning the material. Isn't it only through struggle that true learning can happen and personal growth can occur? Think if the pride felt by the learner when solving a problem he or she couldn't have dreamed to have been able to solve.  When is it necessary to be able to read a textbook and solve problems and learn how to learn stuff in an independent way? This seems to go against the 21st Century Learning expectations, thus my hesitancy to enter with both feet into this new world I see through the open door.

With all of us spending more and more time online in our online communities we are losing touch with our world and actual community, and it makes me wonder where is the balance between technology and the real world? How do utilize technology without becoming dangerously immersed in it or without as Thoreau said "becoming tools of our tools?"  One of my colleagues challenged me to question the line in which we are running technology versus when it is running us. How do we maintain high expectations for the kids and give them the opportunity to practice hard work mastering difficult concepts while still using technology in a thoughtful and meaningful way? I want to use technology in the classroom, but until I figure out where the line is for becoming too immersed, less physically connected, possibly less rigorous, and perhaps deficient in physical activity I am treading lightly in the technology ocean.