Panelists Weigh New Teaching Mediums
By Deborah Young

Imagine what would happen if a Johnny Appleseed character brought antibiotics to a stone-age society. Without receiving instructions for the medicine’s use, some tribe members might place the bottle on an altar and worship it, and others might remove the pills and roll them over their bodies. “Very few of them, I wager, would take one every four to six hours,” said Chris Dede, the keynote speaker at the early October conference “Making Technology Work in Our Schools.”

Merely having access to high-tech tools does not magically boost learning, Dede told the crowd of roughly 200 educators at City University. The key is incorporating technology into an educational model that challenges stereotypes about schooling, he said. Discussions about technology opened the door to broader questions about teaching during an evening that featured Dede, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, along with panelists Allen D. Glenn of the University of Washington, Director of the Center for Children and Technology, Margaret Honey, and Chip Kimball, Asst. Supt. at Lake Washington School District in Richmond WA. Anthony Picciano of Hunter College moderated.

“We have many ways of teaching and learning that are really profound,” Dede said. “Within my lifetime it will be considered malpractice for people to teach with only one medium.”But educators must remain creative in “this age of regressive schooling” and let go of socially imbedded ideas about learning, he said. “Professional development means unlearning almost subconscious beliefs,” he said. “It’s not primarily intellectual; it’s also emotional and social.”

Pedagogical flexibility is especially important in the protean, ever-advancing field of technology, where equity means more than counting the ratio of computers to children, Dede said. “It’s exciting and daunting and at the same time, it’s a very interesting time in history,” he said. The sea change in communications also means that students may be more technologically sophisticated than their teachers, said Kimball, whose school district is within shouting distance of Microsoft headquarters. “What happens when the students know more than the teachers,” Kimball said. “This is the generation ‘zap’ not ‘gap’“.

Even so, good teaching still stands on its own, he said. And model technology education is expansive, not reductive, Honey agreed. “There are upsides and downsides offered by the new technologies,” she said. “There is the potential for the mundane-such as Power Point as a motivational exercise in special effects-and there is thinking about technology and talking deeply and seriously about the kinds of learning we want kids to be engaged in.” For students at the High School for Environmental Studies on West 56th Street, learning about technology went hand in hand with inquiry and activism. They created a website based on ecological findings about Brooklyn’s polluted Gowanus Canal, trading information via email with scientists to further their knowledge. “Working on computers made it much more convenient,” said senior Julia Curtis, who was among students displaying their technology-based work during the networking reception after the speakers. “We had easy access to all kinds of information right in front of us.”#

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