Category: MEd (Page 2 of 2)

What is the reality of education technology in your context (district, school, classroom)?

Interview with Chelsea Kiddine: Technology Innovation Coordinator for School District 22

I am grateful to have developed a close relationship with our District Coordinator for Technology Innovation. In 2020, Chelsea came into my classroom and did a six-week residency, integrating gamification into my classes. What I learned from her has stuck to my pedagogy like glue; rather than the mindset that “learning CAN be fun”, Chelsea argues that “learning SHOULD ALWAYS be fun.”

I asked Chelsea to come to my current classroom for an interview to discuss technology integration in our district.

My Question: How do you think our district is doing in terms of technology integration?

“Our district has a long way to go technologically wise, there’s a few factors.  We have an aging teaching population so we have teachers that are comfortable in very traditional roots, which don’t often, we have differentiating supports for students.  Schools have different levels of support for things like PAC or tech plan budgets.  I think a main drawback is that our teachers are still very uncomfortable with the idea of students using personal devices such as phones to access technologies.”

Chelsea Kiddine

My response:

I agree with this.  I came back to teaching after a decade running my own business, and I was shocked to see how little had changed in the classroom.  I aimed for a paperless classroom, with the integration of E Portfolio’s and authentic work.  The school I taught at, didn’t even allow students to access the wifi.  This created a great disparity between students who could afford cell phones and data – and those who couldn’t.  I also saw that I was taking away a crucial piece of their learning by creating the content FOR them.  After a long dispute with the staff, I pitched the positives of having accessibility and equity for students, and my Principal made the decision to allow access.  By the end of the semester, my students demonstrated their E Portfolio’s to a panel of district administrators and teachers, including the Superintendent of School District 22.  I was proud of my students for learning new digital literacy skills, including content creation, video editing, and digital portfolio creations. I still fight the pedagogical preference of teachers who do not “want to learn anything new.”

Valuable Differentiation Between Creation vs Consumption:

“I think we have this theory in our head like consumption equals bad right? Which is what we’re consuming and how you’re consuming it.  Take minecraft for example.  We could interview a hundred parents and they might say their child is mindlessly playing Minecraft.  My husband calls it virtual lego, like what we are building today.  It’s a huge perspective shift which I think ties into why we’re having trouble with more traditional teachers seeing the value in it.  Listening to a podcast about how to support your transition in the LGBTQ plus community, that’s consuming.  But it’s not the same thing as mindlessly scrolling TikTok.  Teaching tools off tik tok, it’s like anything else, we don’t have to teach the kids to stop consuming so much as we have to teach them how to sift their consumption because we all know social media can be bad.”

Chelsea Kiddine

Me:

This was valuable to hear.  I’ve been pushing my students to be aware of their consumption, to track their screen time, and be aware of the addiction and negatives of social media.  I’ve also encouraged creation – and seen the creativity of students blossom when they’re given opportunities to express themselves digitally.  Through Minecraft, Video Edits, and Video Game creations, my students have been able to demonstrate an extended understanding of creative thinking.

My Question: Where can teachers start?

“Ask the kids if there’s something that you want to try.  They are better at this than us. We have to stop banning technology from them.  What I always tell people is to teach your kids to regulate with their phone on their desk so that you’re not having a conversation after they wrapped a car around a tree.  If we don’t teach them to regulate now, we’re going to pay for it later.  We see them more than their parents, we play a huge role and we can teach them  how to use it properly, but we have to trust them to fail first.” “They are digital youth.  This is their language.”

Chelsea Kiddine

Critical Reflection:

Chelsea has a strong stance. I remember Michael, our class Professor, saying to explore statements such as these: “They are the digital youth” with a critical lens. Exploring this topic more, I found a relevant research paper, “Digital Learning and Participation among Youth: Critical Reflections on Future Research Priorities” (Livingstone, 2010). The article outlined exactly what I was looking for, in that it questioned the validity of using such terms as “digital youth.” It says, “Arguably, the expansion of the field to everything digital stretches the expertise of any single researcher too far, inviting interesting but sometimes difficult multidisciplinary collaborations. The expansion may even lead to the misleading construction of new objects of study. This is less apparent when digital modifies verbal nouns—as in learning and networking—because processes are always fluid; it is more apparent when digital modifies nouns, seeming to redefine what is important about them—for example, digital youth and its popular counterparts, digital natives, digital citizens, and the digital generation.” The article goes on to describe the importance of not glamorizing the internet and digital opportunity but rather to look at all the factors of influence on an adolescent. I appreciate that the article also dives into psychology when describing the vulnerability of the brain in adolescence. As psychologists know, teenagers are still developing their pre-frontal cortex, an area of the brain responsible for executive functioning, for impulse-control, and risk-taking assessment. I remember reading in my under-graduate studies in Psychology that teenagers will often know that the outcome of something risky is potentially bad, but they will outweigh this knowledge with the necessity to try new things. They cannot yet control themselves. This article again relates this back to my initial comment about the “digital youth” in this paragraph:

“Such activity is a serious enterprise for teenagers because they are, and must be, “constantly engaged in risk assessment, actively creating and defining hierarchies premised upon different discourses of risk as ‘normal’ and acceptable or ‘dangerous’ and out of control” (Green, Mitchell, and Bunton 2000, pp. 123–24), this being the way they move from dependence to independence. Thus, we may better understand teenagers’ search for freedom, connection, and identity online, a space they are allowed to occupy because of the popularity of the digital native rhetoric among parents and the media.” (Livingstone, 2010, p. 7)

The article goes on to say that typically the conversations around risks of online activity are happening after the incidents take place. That we, as adults, recognize the risks but aren’t appropriately teaching them to the youth. Instead, we expect them to have armed themselves with critical thinking when they are not yet capable of weighing these. “First, children do not draw the line where adults do, so opportunities and risks often relate to the same activity” (Livingstone, 2010, p. 8). “Third and most important, learning in and of itself involves risk taking—“resilience can only develop through exposure to risk or to stress” (Coleman and Hagell 2007, p. 15). To expand their experience and expertise, to build confidence and resilience, children must push against adult-imposed boundaries. Thus, identity, intimacy, privacy, and vulnerability are all closely related.” (Livingstone, 2010, p. 8) This is a more comprehensive exploration of the topic of “digital youth” and I appreciate the article’s inclusion of the malleability of our youth from a biological and psychological stance. It feels like every bit of research that I do, I become passionate about that topic and want to explore it more. This research sends me in an opposite direction as I began this blog post and leaves me with the following questions:

• How much research is being done about the psychological impacts of technology integration?
• Because of the dichotomy of youth pushing against adult-imposed boundaries, is it even possible to create risk-awareness around digital usage?

Reference List:

Livingstone, S. (2010). Digital Learning and Participation among Youth: Critical Reflections on Future Research Priorities. International Journal of Learning and Media, 2(2–3), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1162/ijlm_a_00046