Technology and Teaching

The relationships between teacher, student, and parent have changed by evolving societal norms but also by the evolution in technology. Students can reach their parents throughout the day, through cell phones and email. Similarly, parents expect teachers to respond quickly to messages. Yet, pedagogy has not advanced much since the days of my grandfather. He and my children were taught high school with a teacher, a desk and a board. We have learned, along with 30 or so others, in neat desks arranged in rows—a factory formula—for 100 years! Why do high school teachers typically have five classes per day, thirty kids per class, teaching about 150 kids per day? Through using the factory model, we can educate the most pupils using the least amount of resources—that is, this model is the most efficient. We sacrifice the quality of one-to-one tutoring that produced the depth and breadth of Thomas Jefferson’s learning for the goal of giving everyone at least some education. Perhaps we can improve on the factory model by using technology. Internet lessons enable students to enjoy the following advantages.

The Excitement of Technology: Technology is the denizen of the young. Young people create it, become fluent in the use of it, and find all the possibilities for its use, both technically and sociologically. They like cutting-edge technology and will more likely attempt an assignment simply because it uses technology. As an adolescent, I used microfilm and card catalogs to do research. I had perhaps six good friends and a few dozen colleagues in the band room and chess club I would consider close acquaintances. There was no Google search and no hundreds of “friends” on Facebook. An old-fashioned research assignment that would elicit groans of protest will instead be tackled with alacrity if it involves researching links you have set up for them on the internet.

Teachers themselves also now have access to an encyclopedic amount of information online that they never had before outside of the Library of Congress, including websites with primary source documents and ready to use PowerPoints, podcasts, and videos.

The Shrinking of Time and Space: Anyone in the world with internet access (living in a nation that allows free exchange of ideas) can access an internet class, watching lectures from famous Yale professors or watch a live cam of life in Jerusalem or Beijing. Anyone in the world can find out about these through search engines. Summer school, just a make-up class or two and not an important venue for socializing or enrichment, will eventually go the way of the dodo bird. Now these few classes can be taught where the students reside—wherever their computer is located—without the expenses heating a building or supporting more than a bare-bones administrative staff. Students download lessons any time of the day or night, working on assignments at their own pace as long as the product or assessment is produced by the deadline. A fifty-minute lesson doesn’t have to be completed in fifty minutes. Fast learners can finish the lesson and the course quickly, and slow learners can take much more time than they would get in the traditional classroom.

Self-Paced Curriculum is Differential Instruction:

Why does the typical United States history course take an academic year to complete? Gifted and ambitious students could complete the textbook readings in much less time but are held back to the slower pacing of the teacher’s lectures and assessments. These more ambitious self-paced students can finish course readings in half the time it would take a student in the regular classroom curriculum. Slower students that need more time than given in a traditional classroom can review lectures and demonstrations on video, PowerPoints, and interactive tutorials as often as they like. The teacher does not force pacing based on an academic calendar. Rather student needs differentiate pacing.

Quicker feedback:

Both students and the teacher depend on the teacher’s scheduled informal and formal classroom assessments to assess whether students are learning. In cyberspace, however, lessons typically include formative multiple choice assessments. These give students immediate feedback on how well they know the material. Smarter software programs provide internal brachiation, choosing new questions depending on how the student answered the last one. Of course, multiple choice tests are not enough. Teachers can assign short answer tests or essays and quickly return these, graded, to the students.

The internet shortens the time of the feedback loop, from student to teacher back to student, since this exchange is not dependent on meeting in a classroom on a certain day of the week. For example, if a student submits a short answer response at 7PM, she may have feedback from the teacher two hours later. In a traditional classroom setting this exchange would take at least 24 hours. Students are “paid” through feedback--any feedback is reinforcing and makes them want to repeat the activity that led to the feedback. The faster they get the feedback the more reinforcing it is.

Differentiation of Curriculum:

Students may be automatically guided to different levels of instruction depending on how they answer assessment questions, saving both student and teacher time and avoiding needless frustration. All students may end the class learning roughly the same amount of material, but they may progress from different starting points.

Keeping Students Honest:

Essays may also be checked for plagiarism and copying from others through online services. It is impossible to do a complete check offline.

Communicating Better with Parents:

Parents get very frustrated with teachers that don’t return calls or emails. A good teacher’s website will link to the students’ grades, the teacher’s email address, and have downloadable current assignments. Parents have everything they need from the teacher on the website. They need to contact you less during the year. When they do contact you and you check and reply to your email daily, parents will feel that you are an empathic and responsive teacher.

Changed Relationships of a Virtual Community:

Some students do not participate in classroom discussions. They may be shy by nature or trained not to be assertive; they may be afraid to open up in front of peers; they may be overshadowed by louder, more aggressive students; or they may be disinterested in the way the material is presented. The online world, the chat room and bulletin board, cannot properly recreate the give and take of the classroom, the nuance of expression or even the timing of a joke. However, many students that do not participate in the classroom for the above reasons will participate in the online virtual classroom. Online anonymity tends to lessen classroom problems of overbearing students, embarrassment in front of peers. Teachers can combine the best of both worlds by mandating that their online class meet physically from time to time.

What to do right now: As soon as you have the time, get yourself a teacher’s website. Perhaps your school district already has the capability to set you up. If not, Google, Weebly,  and other online businesses offer free sites and still other companies offer sites custom made for teachers for low costs, less than $50/year. Search online for “websites for teachers.” Most of these require no knowledge of code, and an absolute beginner can work easily within the architecture designed for educators and have lessons online within an hour.