When Tom Hassan named me the Bates-Russell Distinguished Faculty Professor in the spring of 2010, he also charged me with investigating classroom technology…what’s out there, how is it being used effectively, and how might Exeter benefit. My tenure in this position began with a conference at the Urban School in San Francisco in July 2010. The Urban School’s Center for Innovative Teaching hosted its annual Integrated Technology Symposium for principals, heads of schools, academic and faculty deans, directors of technology and education professionals interested in visioning the future of their schools. This workshop focused on establishing 1:1 schools. That is, schools in which all students have a laptop computer with them in all classes.
I followed this conference up in May of 2011 with a two-day visit to the Urban School to see this 1:1 program in action. Also, while in California, I visited the Branson School and Redwood High School in Marin County. Being a form Redwood Giant, I felt enough years had passed since my graduation that I could safely enter the school and not be sent immediately to the Dean of Boy’s Office. While all of the schools I visited had substantially more classroom technology for both teacher and student use than we here at Exeter currently have, it was the Urban School program that was most impressive. Here I sat in English, Spanish, and history classes where students and teachers used laptop computers seamlessly.
In English, students read a poem by John Donne which was projected on the interactive whiteboard. Then students came up and marked what they thought were important parts of the poem, then the discussion centered on why each student had made the annotations they had made. Since a SmartBoard was used, all images were saved to a folder so students could access them later. In another English class, students were working on what makes good writing. A poorly written paragraph was projected and students, again working in pairs, revised the paragraph on their laptops, then emailed them to the teacher who projected them on the board. At the conclusion of the class the teacher explained to me how the students do peer editing via groups on email. She said, ”I can’t imagine teaching English without a laptop.” In Spanish the teacher used an interactive whiteboard to work on grammar. He’d project a question in Spanish and the kids would orally respond. He then had students look at exercises on their laptops. In history, Contemporary China taught by Clarke Weatherspoon, the kids, working in pairs, used a program called Inspiration to chart what they thought were significant changes in China from 1970 to 1980. They then shared their results with the class via the projector again hooked up to an interactive white board.
So, how does all this relate to Exeter? I think we all agree that we have a great school… but great isn’t greater or greatest. A Harkness classroom is without equal but can Harkness-table discussions be improved with technology? Can we make an Exeter education better? What are the advantages of technologically rich classrooms? On a more individual level, what will we do with these iPads? I can envision a mathematics class where students all have an iPad with our materials downloaded in PDF-format. They do their homework on their iPad using one of the many note-taking applications, like Penultimate, and we project solutions, wirelessly, to an interactive whiteboard where we can annotate and make corrections, which can be saved and shared via an application such as Dropbox. All of this ultimately saves class time allowing for more Harkness table discussion, which is what we are all about.
We need to address these questions and more or we leave ourselves open to being passed by while reveling in our current success only to look up and find other schools way ahead of us. While change within Exeter may happen slowly, change in the outside world can happen all too quickly and we must be ready to adapt. A great example of adaptability is the digital camera… Imagine the look on executives’ faces at Eastman Kodak when someone one walked into the board room with a digital camera. Kodak, whose mainstay since 1935 had been Kodachrome film, adapted and refocused on digital photography and digital printing. They stopped production of film in 2009. To quote Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, “If the rate of change inside an institution is less than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight.”
I think we can continue to offer an outstanding education to our kids and be leaders in the use of educational technology. We owe it to our current and future students to stay abreast of changes in educational technology or risk becoming irrelevant.
You don’t have to be a techie to stay abreast of this rapidly changing area of education. I can’t program a computer to save my life. The only time I was interested in programming was when a program called C+ came out. I figured any language entitled with my grade point average I could understand. Wrong.
Our students are already adept at using computers, smart phones, and tablets. It’s clearly a different world than that in which most of us grew up. We should embrace and take advantage of the technology that our students are so comfortable with. The iPad “gift” from our trustees is a huge beginning and will allow us to explore the benefits of technology and discuss them in both department and faculty meeting venues throughout this year.
The conference I attended at the Urban School was run by our speaker this morning, Howard Levin.
Howard Levin is the Director of Educational Innovation and Information Services, leading the educational technology program at Convent and Stuart Hall Schools of the Sacred Heart after holding the same position at Urban School for the past 12 years.
In his position at Urban, Howard was responsible for implementing a 1:1 student and teacher laptop program, making Urban the first high school in the San Francisco Bay Area to distribute laptop computers to all students and teachers.
As a result, technology at Urban is integrated throughout the curriculum to achieve natural and seamless use to support student learning, communication and organization - all without computer skills training classes.
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