http://www.homestead.com/judy_lightfoot

http://www.homestead.com/judy_lightfoot/files/Simple_Mandarins.html

http://homestead.com/judy_lightfoot/files/Laptops_in_the_Classroom.html

June 26, 2000

At Bruce Bailey’s suggestion, I visited the 7^th-grade laptop pilot project at Lakeside Middle School to gather impressions that might be useful to people who will be making technology decisions for the Upper School in Fall 2000. Bruce thought my observations would be helpful because I’m an experienced Lakeside teacher who has used computers and the Net frequently and successfully in my classroom as well as in my career as a publishing writer. So between May 15 and 23, I paid five visits to the middle school. My sampling was small due to time constraints, but it was also informative.

I summarized my notes on these visits, and afterward I read the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL)’s report on the pilot project. Even though my assumptions and methods differed from those of NWREL staff, many of my observations agree with theirs. Still, because my analysis yields some different conclusions, my report shouldn’t seem redundant.

Bruce and others who have read the NWREL report already know that it doesn’t make an argument about whether a school-wide laptop mandate is a good idea. NWREL staff assumed that the 7^th-grade pilot project is Lakeside’s first step in implementing a decision to become a laptop school, and their goal was to draw conclusions about whether and how well this movement is progressing. Thus the questions NWREL staff asked were not about whether laptops are educationally effective, but about how often and in what ways laptops were being used in 7^th grade, whether there was enough professional, tech-nical, and financial support for the project, and in what ways the project felt satisfactory or unsatisfactory to students, parents, and teachers. The NWREL report gives good data in response to these good questions.

My purpose is to assist September 2000 decision-making about technology by supplementing the NWERL report. This paper is based on more anecdotal evidence, but it will add, I hope, a valuable perspective. It offers the viewpoint of a master teacher with intimate knowledge of Lakeside, and it proposes more than one technological option. Its main argument is that an educational rationale must be created as a basis for making choices about using technology at the school.

(See Appendix A for a complete summary of my notes.)

I spent 10-30 minutes in each of six 7^th-grade classes — math, computer skills, history, and English. Four of these groups of students were using computers at the time. These classrooms were happy, busy scenes, with students generally well focused on assigned tasks. 7^th-graders wrote computer programs; found and bookmarked Internet sources to make HTM pages on their individual subjects; wrote about each other’s web pages; and made Power Point presentations on aspects of the Internet. Students easily and frequently shifted around among windows, programs, and files, and there was lots of typing and active on-screen movement. Two students (one a girl) enjoyed being tech "experts" and tech resource persons for classmates in more than one class.

Most faculty expressed a desire to use the technology well and felt that the pilot project had some real achievements to its credit: Teachers agreed that the Net’s historical archives and information about current events are excellent, very accessible resources. They said that some kids get deeply involved in research projects they might not dive into without the Net and revising activity they might not sustain without a computer. One English assignment was brilliant in my view — students wrote and recorded their own radio stories using NPR resources (including audio) on the Net. Some students exploited the potential of Power Point well, finding images that vividly illustrated their presentations. Teachers also agreed that most students enjoy using the technology, organize their school paraphernalia more efficiently, produce neater work, and are likely to stay focused on their tasks for longer periods when using computers. (As if to underscore this point, in a class I observed that was not using computers but instead holding a discussion, there was much side talk, acting out, inattention, even rudeness.)

• The Net offers students and teachers a wealth of quickly accessible information, the most valuable of which is contained in archives unavailable in the library (Jefferson’s speeches; Supreme Court decisions; historical photographs; artworks) and up-to-date material on current events.

• The papers and presentations of students using computers are neater and more legible.
• Computers and the Net focus student attention. The screen and the constantly shifting colors, images, and formats, and the student’s continual small-motor manipulations — these make the technology engaging, even irresistible. So projects feel less tedious to many kids, and they stay with them longer.
• Students acquire technical confidence and competence — typing, formatting, sending and receiving e-mail, editing, making web pages, using search engines, using Power Point.

• Every student can organize and track his or her own paraphernalia because so many files, papers, notes, and resources are on his or her computer. This year more boys are better organized than they otherwise would be, and so are some girls.

• Every student is guaranteed access to a computer when needed — theoretically, at least (in practice, students’ computers don’t always work).
• Every student’s technological life is simplified because all laptops are compatible with other school technology — theoretically, at least (in practice, many kids have to coordinate two computers after all; laptops are often incompatible with family printers, in which case students have to use family desktops when at home).

Teaching and learning time was lost due to technical difficulties, weaknesses in computer applications, or a teacher too busy elsewhere in the room to help a student in trouble. In 3 classes, 1 or more students lacked a computer. 2 or more students in 3 classes took 5+ minutes to boot up programs and files; 3 students in 1 class took 10 minutes to boot up. 6 or more students in 3 classes experienced serious technical difficulties or confusions about the computer program or application. The Power Point presentation was mediocre and dull, and though classmates participated, they seemed bored and disengaged.

All faculty agreed that leadership has been poor. Leaders have not offered a vision or rationale for technology use in education. Teachers said their preparation was weak in other ways, and that they need (and requested) a master teacher/mentor with tech expertise to work with them individually — the kind of faculty member who made laptop programs succeed at SAS and CCD — but such a person wasn’t hired.

Many faculty said that daily instruction, learning, and classroom atmosphere were sometimes compromised in significant ways: When students use computers in class while trying to discuss and take notes, they can’t doodle or sketch (important aids to thinking). When students read CD or on-screen texts they can’t annotate (annotation is central to active learning and an important academic practice). Teachers can’t unobtrusively monitor what kids are doing on their computers, so classes sometimes have a more military atmosphere, with teachers having to bark commands at students or to stalk around peering over students’ shoulders at their screens. Computers "make plagiarism all too easy." [Author’s note: I myself saw a student paste a series of Internet texts into the report s/he was writing.] Time spent on technology used to be spent on teaching and learning of greater depth and complexity.

Faculty also said that some of the least educationally effective technologies (like Power Point) get overused, and some good applications remain underused or ignored: Computers are perfect for some problems in math because in the act of being used they teach a particular style of logic, and they give immediate feedback. But students should learn a range of thinking styles and approaches to math problems, not just Excel, and should learn programming, too, to see how technology works. Faculty web pages are a waste of time, when all that teachers need to know is how to make HTM class pages with links to assignments and sources, and how to post a page on department or course websites. Finally, the Net isn’t judiciously used — some sites are excellent, but most of the Net is devoted to infotainment, not information, and "even good information isn’t knowledge." Students aren’t always learning or working with information, either, beyond collecting, bookmarking, and inserting links to sites. More than half the material on the Net is pornographic, too, with smut turning up in academic searches — and students are unsupervised during free periods.

As the positive observations indicate, work with computers and the Internet clearly has some educational value. The negative observations are equally significant. This conflict implies a serious need to examine the tradeoffs and develop a rationale for using technology at Lakeside.

It’s the job of educational leaders who mandate a wholesale change in a school’s pedagogy and curriculum to teach their faculty why the change is educationally important and how selected features of the change reinforce best practices in their subject areas. Without informed leadership, a sweeping innovation in education would take years to impose on academic professionals. Eventually, it would either fail to take hold or be adopted only in its most visible, superficial respects to comply with the demands of administrators while minimizing interference with their work "in the trenches." In either case, professional morale and the quality of instruction would decline, and cynicism would rise.

A leader’s job is also to set an example of critical thinking about a mandated wholesale change by acknowledging that the adoption of any educational innovation entails tradeoffs, and by analyzing some of those tradeoffs. This point is crucial. Today, public discourse about technology in education is couched in simplistic claims — either for or against. But no innovation is ever merely a gain. Every choice to do or emphasize one thing means not doing and not emphasizing another thing. When one kind of skill is being taught, another kind of skill is not being taught. When one teaching resource is purchased or used, another resource is not being purchased or used. At Lakeside, time spent on developing approaches to educational technology is time not spent on diversity, on ethics and civility, on community service, on conservation and the natural environment, and on important academic topics we never get around to, such as creating interdisciplinary approaches to thinking and writing 5-12.

But (without intending to do so) Lakeside’s leadership has not only discouraged but also impeded critical thinking among professionals at the school about these complexities of education and technology. Leaders have taken vaguely pro positions only and have failed to develop frameworks that could help the professionals who work for them identify and weigh the tradeoffs between various specific choices and practices. As a result, teachers have been denied the exercise of their most important professional responsibility: to understand the effects on their students of the pedagogical and curricular choices they make, course by course and moment by moment, and to act on their understanding.

This situation has implications not just for Lakeside’s technology program but also for the philosophical integrity of the school. Currently the school is operating in contradiction to its stated goals.

• Lakeside needs an educational rationale about technology that supports the mission statement’s reference to "effective educators." The current approach to technology has (despite best intentions to the contrary) made teachers less effective. Granted, all Lakeside teachers are not "good to outstanding" in their work, and some refuse to be team players. But all faculty, the best and the worst, are being tossed into technology projects that lack vision, leadership, systematic preparation, support, reliable equipment, and clear educational advantages, with no reduction in their usual workday to give them time to develop competence on the job. Then they’re blamed (as in the NWERL report, p. iii), for not having attended "professional development sessions" for which they had no time, and whose relevance to the demands and intricacies of their particular subject area sounded tenuous at best.

• The rationale needs to harmonize with the Board’s charge to the Head to develop a balanced, coherent program and curriculum 5-12. At present, there is no basis for critiquing proposals in which most if not all instruction will be computer-centered, even though such a class would be just as incommensurate with a balanced educational technology program as would a class that never considered using computers at all.
• The rationale needs to be consistent with the administration’s recently stated goal of ensuring that teachers develop a personal working relationship with each of their students. In light of this goal, technology should retain its proper classroom role as supplementary, not central, and students should not routinely be left to engage in solitary or group computer activities followed by individual presentations. Such "activity/project" pedagogies must be used sparingly, as adjuncts to the face-to-face, sustained, recursive discussions with peers and teacher that are Lakeside’s hallmarks. The non-computer-centered discussion class I observed (p. 2 above) may have gone poorly because time spent on computers may develop students’ technical competence and comfort at the expense of their competence and comfort in sustained, direct discussion with peers and authority figures.
• The rationale should cohere with the Board’s charge to ensure an ethical core in the Lakeside program and community, with Lakeside’s mission of developing healthy bodies, and with the Board’s responsibility for guarding the school against lawsuits. On the Net, even strictly academic searches turn up XXX-rated sites. Lakeside students are not continually supervised by adults. Cybersex addiction is now an A.M.A.-recognized disease (NYT, May 16, 2000, p. D7). Alumni could sue the school later on for having exposed them at a susceptible age to pornography that became a habit and eventually made them ill.

Clearly, Lakeside must develop an intelligent, balanced, coherent, systematic program for using technology in instruction. But we can’t do so without a solid, persuasive educational rationale to govern technology use and provide philosophical guidance for ongoing analysis of present and future practices.

Lakeside not only must develop and adopt a philosophical rationale but also must continually re-examine and revise it in light of observations from effective teachers who will only gradually understand the uses and consequences of this millennium’s remarkable technological innovations.

(1) The decision about technology to be made next September should not be framed in terms of "whether or not Lakeside will be a laptop school." This falsely implies that no approach to technology might be chosen. A true decision would be a choice among real options, such as the following:

Option A: Lakeside will become a laptop school, placing computers at the center of the daily lives of students and of daily instruction at all levels.

Option B: Lakeside will treat computers as important tools that supplement its traditional intellectual center in class discussion and inquiry. Thus the large classrooms (there are 7 or more at the upper school besides the Grotto and the library classroom) will be equipped with on-line desktops and ancillary technology such as projectors around the perimeters, and discussion tables at the center. This arrangement would guarantee that all upper school English, history, and language classes, rotated through these classrooms, could be given a minimum of 1 period a week in a well-equipped computer space. (Allen-Gates has its own science/math computers, plus space for more. The new Arts building has classroom space enough for desktops to supplement the Arts program as needed.) Because language classes need computers less frequently than English and history, some humanities classes could be scheduled for the rooms 1 - 2x per week. The rooms would have extra Internet outlets for students preferring to use their personal laptops.

Option C: Lakeside will ensure that students have experience with both laptops and desktops, while retaining discussion and inquiry as the center of classroom work, by having 7^th and 8^th grades use laptops and equipping 7+ upper-school grade classrooms with desktops (as in "b").

(2) Lakeside needs a new, streamlined, first-rate technology system and support. Perhaps because technology at Lakeside (like its curriculum) has been jury-rigged and piggy-backed on top of old, outdated systems over the years, teachers and students are continually hampered by technology failures. A strong school-wide technology program will require a large annual budget, sufficient tech staff, and administrative professionals who are both master teachers and skilled in the uses of educational technology. It will also require the purchase of excellent programs (e.g., Commonspace) for instructional use — Word and Excel won’t suffice.

(3) Particular skills in teaching with technology should not be optional for teachers and administrators, but a requirement for hiring and retention. Without the ability to use technology with knowledge and nimbleness, faculty will be (and are) unable to make wise choices in their work with students. Yet it is unreasonable to expect teachers to learn everything possible about technology. A list of basic skills that all faculty must learn should be made in light of the school’s philosophy regarding technology in education — a list that explains for each skill some worthy educational purposes and exemplary instructional applications. Administrators and faculty should be tested on these skills.

(4) In any case, teachers should not be pressed to use technology in education until administrators provide a strong, balanced philosophical rationale for doing so that acknowledges benefits and drawbacks and that reflects Lakeside values and goals.

• Students worked on writing computer programs.

• Students compiled Internet sources and used them as class texts.
• Students had found and bookmarked Internet sources for their web pages on individual topics.
• Students wrote reports on each other’s web pages.
• A student made a Power Point presentation about search engines.
• Students at computers easily and frequently shifted around among windows, programs, and files.

• Most students were both energetic and focused in computer tasks — lots of active on-screen changes, including lots of typing.
• Two students obviously enjoyed being sought-after tech "experts" and tech resource persons by classmates in more than one class.

• A student selected a series of Internet texts and pasted them into the report s/he was writing.
• At the start of 3/4 classes, two or more students in 3 classes took 5 or more minutes to boot up programs and files. Three students took 10 minutes.
• In 3/4 classes, one or more students lacked a computer ("It has a virus." "It’s broken.")

• During 3/4 classes, one or more students experienced technical difficulties or confusions about the computer program or technical procedures.
• A student read a Power Point presentation in a monotone. Classmates seemed less focused and interested during the Power Point presentation than during the other computer classes I observed.
• Emphasis in 3/4 classes was on finding information and reporting on it, not on critical thinking beyond prompts like "How useful is the website?" or "Make up questions about the material you found."

A. We want to use the technology well and skillfully.

B. We support the idea of using laptops across the 7^th grade this year (that’s what a "pilot project" means, so it makes sense that we all had to do it).

C. It’s ok that there’s no "laptop program," because the phrase is a misnomer. Laptops are tools usable for certain tasks, like calculators in math — but we don’t have a "calculator program."

D. Some good things were accomplished this year.

• Everyone’s more technologically adept.
• (According to one teacher) most faculty felt that the technology had a positive impact and that student learning wasn’t seriously hampered by technology.
• One teacher said the technology neither helped nor hurt student learning or writing in his/her class but became an added available tool.
• In one class, students were able to produce and record their own radio stories using NPR resources (written text, audio recordings) on the Net.
• In another class, students did a project using "The 100 most important stories of the century" at the CNN website — study all, choose one, write about it in a journalistic style and format.

• One teacher is interested in learning how to hook up all the laptops in his/her class so students and teacher can pool data and produce graphs of all data combined — this is a basic LAN (Local Area Network) setup.

E. Computers and wired classrooms have real advantages.

• Well edited historical archives and information about current events on the Net are great resources.
• Most of the kids enjoy using computers and the Net, and they are more likely to stay on task. [Author’s note: Indeed, in a class that was not using computers but was holding a discussion, there was much side talk, acting out, inattention, failure to listen to others, even some rudeness.]
• Some kids really get into research projects that they might not otherwise have been able to do.
• Kids with computers are better organized and produce neater work.
• Some students have exploited the potential of Power Point well and have found images that were really important to their presentations.

A. Leadership has been poor.

• No one in charge has a vision for technology at Lakeside. Administrators just keep saying "Technology’s a powerful tool for education" or "It’s the way of the future."
• Administrators were confusing about the pilot project. First they said "You’ll plan and develop 1-2 units of computer instruction to return to periodically throughout the year," and then it was "You’ll use laptops regularly in your classes."

B. Thus teacher preparation has been inadequate.

• Administrators seemed to hope we’d pull each other up by each other’s bootstraps and get any help we needed from tech staff. They hoped that collaboration supplemented with occasional consulting with tech staff would work. Anyone who tried to teach students this way would fail.
• We asked for (but didn’t get) a teacher mentor who knows pedagogy and curriculum and who has some tech savvy, to sit in classes and connect with teachers and work with them individually. We need the kind of person who made laptop programs succeed at SAS and CCD.
• Many of us had to scramble to do anything at all with laptops in our classes, and the overall quality of teaching suffered as a result.
• It’s scary to think of two grade levels using laptops next year — there wasn’t enough in the way of policy, vision, teacher expertise, or practical support for one grade level this year.

C. There are lots of technical difficulties.

• The Internet server isn’t reliable. We can’t count on it for getting planned work done.
• Technical difficulties make publishing student work on computers "a nightmare."

• We lose teaching and learning time. In a recent class, a student presenter’s hard drive was broken; the teacher had to go get another computer and replace the hard drive.

D. Some of the most frequently assigned technology applications aren’t all that effective, and some good ones are underused.

• Power Point is the dullest tool we have, with very narrow purposes. It’s distracting and time-consuming compared to the old way of doing things, which means the quality of content in student presentations has sunk. Students cut and paste material into slides, put bullets up and feel satisfied with the colorful outline, instead of thinking through how to teach classmates. Then they just stand and read the words off the screen. It’s a barrier rather than a facilitator because it dumbs down student work — they learn less information, do less thinking, don’t know their topics as well, though they learn the technology.
• Aside from certain well-edited archives and sources on current events, the Net is a less reliable provider of good information (professionally balanced, distilled, and edited for educational effectiveness) than other sources. Most of the Net is devoted to infotainment, not information, and even good information isn’t knowledge.
• It’s a waste of time for teachers to make elaborate web pages, though all should know how to create an HTM class page with links to assignments and sources, and how to post it on the school website.
• (Math teacher): Finding Internet sources doesn’t further my students’ education.
• (3 math teachers): Most of what we do in math isn’t enhanced by computers. Calculators are, of course, often necessary, and for some problems, computers are exactly the right tool. They teach a particular style of logic in the process of being used, and they give immediate feedback. But there is a range of approaches to every problem; Excel is not always the right tool; we want to teach more styles of thinking than what computers offer.
• All kids should do some programming so that they understand how the technology really works.

E. Teaching, learning, and class atmosphere are sometimes compromised.

• The mood important to reading a literary piece is lost in on-screen viewing, though students may not have same experience adults have.
• Using computers in class, students can’t doodle or do artwork as they discuss and write. Sometimes kids need to do some concrete messing or sketching to sustain or clarify their thinking.
• Using computers for research makes plagiarism all too easy.
• [Author’s note: In my best professional judgment, 2 Internet projects in the humanities took nearly twice as much time as would the same projects using books.]
• You can’t see what kids are doing in a class with computers. Some read their e-mail or send assignments to a different teacher while on-line in a class, or do homework for another class.
• Computers give our middle school a different atmosphere. Unless students are totally absorbed in an assigned task onscreen, teachers have to be more dictatorial ("Screens down!" "Look up!" ).
• If we really held ourselves accountable for keeping students on task, we’d have to constantly patrol and peer at what they were doing on their computers. Teachers can be less vigilant in a room where students are working with books and papers.
• A world of pornography at the fingertips of a 7^th-grader! How are we going to protect them from exposure to smut? When kids have wireless modems, they’ll know teachers can’t find out what they’re seeing and reading around the corner or outside the building. Already they’ve found X-rated screen savers and downloaded them on school computers.

F. Despite publicity to the contrary, computers never provide perfect, seamless, or complete solutions.

• Students who carry laptops can’t carry much else. But texts on CD are impractical because they’re too expensive ($125 vs. $35 for a comparable book), they’re not always available, students can’t annotate CD texts (an essential feature of active learning), and people can’t read screen text with the concentration they can bring to text on paper.
• Printers at home are incompatible with many laptops. Many kids use the family desktop at home.

G. Lakeside doesn’t need a laptop mandate:

• Kids will learn the technology they need over the years in our present program. Computers are already part of their lives. Only half my class needed help feeling comfortable w/ technology, and that didn’t take much time.
• If we had one more computer lab here at the MS, we’d have enough desktops to meet all class needs, at least in math. .
• Nothing we did this year couldn’t have been done without laptops.

H. Laptops are expensive. The cost for a family with 3 kids at a laptop school would be exorbitant.

4 middle school teachers contributed to this summary, a useful reminder that computers do not foster the central goals of a Lakeside education:

• Lakeside 7^th- and 8^th- graders should be able to look at a problem, make judgments about it, explore both together and alone, articulate the exploration process (orally, in writing), design different kinds of responses, develop strategies & solutions.
• They should stay open about solutions. Keep questioning and testing. Come to provisional, not ironclad, standpoints.
• They should figure things out in physical, kinesthetic ways as well as symbolic — manipulating objects, drawing, acting. 7^th-8^th-grade kids are full of physical energy. Hands-on experiments engage the whole student and help students feel connected with what they’re doing.
• They should work well together, but also spend time alone to think and reflect. Kids today get constant stimulation and need reverie time, as well as time enough to make mistakes without undue anxiety, and recoup.

• They should read good books, write lots, and communicate thoughtfully — what Lakeside’s always been about.

• Their teachers shouldn’t use direct instruction or the "sage on the stage" role in an effort to get quick, visible results (e.g., using "point systems" for motivation and assessment). They should plan for long-term growth.

• Students also need models (sometimes these are peers) who love to inquire and are curious, and aren’t hampered by a need to "get the right answer."

Not only do the acknowledged benefits of the 7^th-grade laptops have little to do with the most important goals of learning and teaching at Lakeside; computers can hinder us in achieving those aims:

• An emphasis on getting and delivering large amounts of information confuses students about what they really need to learn. Students have always had access to good information, and very little of their most important work has ever been about collecting large amounts or managing it. The real challenge is always in learning how to think critically about information until it can be made into knowledge — which can eventually grow, one hopes, into wisdom.
• Students who are used to finding huge amounts of information with a "click" may never be motivated to find the best information when it’s not immediately at hand, and may never realize why it’s a good idea to seek beyond vast bookmarked files of the most accessible material.

• When the dominant goals of instruction are neatness and organization, it’s hard for students to see the rich value and potential of intellectual muddles, provisional thinking, playing around with problems, and writing boldly experimental, risk-taking rough drafts.
• Students focused on the goal of coming up with colorful, clever, or slick delivery techniques (like Power-Point "bells & whistles") for lively presentations are distracted from thinking hard about the content or substance of their tasks.

Note: To hard copies of this report, I attached two photocopies, one of the New York Times article on cybersex addiction that I mentioned above, and one of my home page in order to remind parents and trustees that I speak from a position of some knowledge and expertise about computer use in general, and about using computers in instruction. I was not invited to discuss the implications of this report with the head of school, with the laptop task force, or with the Education Committee of the Board of Trustees. To my knowledge, a few decision-makers had copies of this report, but it was not discussed in detail by any group.