Illustration by Dan Page
It’s 1962, and Fidel Castro issues an order via Twitter that “all U.S. aircraft flying over Cuba be shot down. Cuba will not succumb to the threat of the U.S.”
…OK, so it’s not actually 1962.
And it’s not Castro issuing the warning.
It’s four decades later, during the 48th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, and Carla Federman’s U.S. history class at Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School is using 140-characters-maximum tweets to portray the roles of key figures in the political standoff. (Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara turns out to be a real tweet hog!)
Teachers like Federman insist that such a marriage of modern software and classroom material serves as an ideal teaching vehicle. “The whole idea of technology enabling you to present outside your class of 15 kids has been a game changer in the past five to eight years,” says Patrick Woessner, MICDS’ middle school coordinator of instructional technology. “Kids are now content creators.”
Schools across the region are embracing a variety of technologies to keep their instruction methods current and vibrant, says Nancy George, director of the Cooperating School Districts’ Virtual Learning Center. “Missouri has done a fairly good job. I don’t know that we are a leader, but we are definitely in the running. There are many initiatives around the state to provide technology and the professional development that goes with it.”
In some cases, the push is simply to have enough computers at school for each child to use, or a one-laptop-per-child ratio in the best-case scenario. In other schools, the focus is on using software or the Internet to make learning more interactive, current, and (dare we say it?) fun.
Lily Childs, a Chinese-language teacher at MICDS, assigns students to converse with each other in Chinese via Twitter. She oversees the conversations, correcting grammar, syntax, and vocabulary as necessary. “It’s fairly effective,” says Elizabeth Helfant, coordinator of instructional technology at MICDS’s upper school. “My son takes it, and it’s more fun to play off another kid than it is to write passages from a textbook.” The end result is that kids learn more, enjoy the process, and acquire practical skills.
“We really look at technology as preparing kids for the 21st century,” adds Woessner. “We want to help them interact online appropriately and know how to network and learn outside the school day.
“The argument can be made that schools like MICDS are doing kids a disservice because you are letting the technology get in the way of interaction,” he continues. “But we would argue against that; when you can have students thinking and working and talking after the 3:15 p.m. dismissal, it opens doors.”
At Trinity Catholic High School in Spanish Lake, there are five computer labs, including two 30-station iMac labs, that enable students to carry out a wide range of projects. Industrial-technology students, for instance, design a home from foundation to roof and everything in between. “That offers a launching point for future success in college and in the fields of architecture and engineering,” says Dan Reardon, Trinity’s technology coordinator.
Instructors at Trinity ask students to create PowerPoint presentations, movies, and websites—and there are some unexpected payoffs. Reardon says he used to wake up kids in class and harangue them to keep down the chatter. Now that he teaches Web design, however, he never has any snoozers and a hush has fallen over the classroom. “They are totally engaged for 85 minutes; that’s a huge thing, and it’s not exclusive to me,” he says. “This isn’t a fashion—it’s a sea change in education. And it’s because the kids are ‘digital natives.’ They grew up with technology.”
The downside of being so engrossed in technology is that it could replace human contact. But at all-girls Notre Dame High School in south St. Louis County, technology brought the girls in Beverly Miller’s child and family development course closer to their families. Miller received a $2,500 Emerson Excellence in Teaching Gold Star Grant to purchase genealogy software, video cameras, netbooks, and DocuPens to scan family documents and old photos. Students interviewed relatives, scanned documents, and constructed family trees—revealing some startling results.
“They were surprised to learn about one grandpa who delivered milk by using a horse and wagon, another who was known for making violins here in St. Louis, and another traced her family back nine generations to Myles Standish of the Mayflower,” says Miller.
The exercise also gave the girls a reason to have the type of in-depth conversations they’d never had before with family members. “Half of my girls don’t even sit down to dinner with their parents, but they really enjoyed it,” says Miller. “This is the ‘Me Generation’; just to get them talking to their grandparents and parents is a great thing.”
At Whitfield School, sophomores in Mike Pomatto’s 20th-century world-history class found themselves chatting with teachers in Poland for a project. The students created a wiki—a collaboratively edited, encyclopedic website—on various aspects of American culture for elementary-school students in Warsaw. Before creating the site, which included lesson plans, quizzes, and videos to illustrate American history and culture, the Whitfield students used an online phone service to talk to Polish educators about the content and the Polish students’ language skills. “Each class was put into a production team. They had to work through all of the organizational issues, technology, writing scripts, et cetera,” recalls Pomatto. “It was learning by teaching.”
It’s not just private schools that are putting technology to creative uses.
In the Rockwood School District, some instructors teach between buildings by using Skype. Students are also able to take advanced classes like Calculus II and III—not offered in the district, but available at St. Louis Community College–Wildwood—via videoconferencing. A student at Selvidge Middle School is taking precalculus via webcam at Eureka High School, for instance, and Spanish teachers in the district are using blogs to encourage students to read and write more in Spanish.
Kids are even using Facebook to create pages for famous figures. For instance, Abraham Lincoln has his own Facebook wall, notes Will Blaylock, Rockwood’s director of instructional technology. “Teachers found that students were really engaged by that, and it forced them to research a popular figure,” he says. “Everybody is looking for innovative devices, but what I tell people is, we need to look at innovative ways to use the devices we have.”
Rockwood has used its $6 million annual technology budget to expand its teaching capacity (all of its buildings are now fully wireless), communicate better with students (each has an email account that includes 25 GB of space to store assignments), and allow instructors to share information and receive assignments uploaded to their websites. All of the elementary-school classrooms also have amplification systems to ensure youngsters—even those hiding in the back of the room—can clearly hear their instructors.
“Research shows that if students hear, they actually learn better,” Blaylock quips.
To take learning beyond the classroom, many technologically advanced St. Louis schools have websites that allow parents to check grades, see what homework assignments are due, and interact more effectively with teachers. “Because parents have access to this information, it cuts down on the lower-level discussion questions between parents and teachers,” says Blaylock. “It gets more into ‘How can I help my son or daughter?’ It raises the level of discussion between parents and teachers, and students take more ownership of their work.”
Whether a school or particular class incorporates technology often comes down to a teacher’s eagerness to adopt it—a tech-savvy teacher’s probably more likely to try such methods. But districts and principals can also encourage technology adoption. “What needs to happen in all schools is, there needs to be long-term professional development—not just setting aside an hour a day for a month,” says George, who recommends a minimum of 30 hours of training per school year. “Technology can be one of those essential tools that allows teachers to reach a broad base of students to improve test scores.”
Most important, adds George, when technology is used in the classroom, it should relate to skills or knowledge kids will need after they graduate. “They need to learn these new, 21st-century skills so they know how to work and collaborate with other people, not only in their classroom but around the world,” she says.
Reardon puts it more bluntly: “At this point, it’s be tech or be Amish.”
Shera Dalin is a freelance writer and co-author of The Art of Barter: How to Trade for Almost Anything. Find her on Twitter at twitter.com/sheramo.
