Category Archives: learning technology

Tony Frontier Says We Must Use AI, and Use It with “Intention”

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Artificial intelligence, or “AI,” is not new. For years, our students have been using forms of what is called “narrow AI.” Maybe the best example of narrow AI is adaptive learning software, in which the technology provides personalized reading and math instruction and practice.

But generative AI products such as Google Gemini are now available. And the interest in the use of these products has exploded—especially among our students—and this school year may become the “AI moment” when this all comes together.

Except educators have tended to view the challenge of AI as figuring out how to keep students from not using it. So when students take on traditional assignments such as research papers, we tend to be concerned they will use AI to “cheat” on the assignment. And much of our energy involving AI has been devoted to blocking its use.

In his new book “AI with Intention: Principles and Action Steps for Teachers and School Leaders” Tony Frontier takes the opposite viewpoint. He urges educators to not only put AI to work in improving our students’ learning, but to do this “with intention”—to work hard to ensure that our use of AI is being effective in helping our kids learn in new and more powerful ways.

Yet to put AI to work in an effective way requires considerable change, and that is what “AI with Intention” is about. Frontier devotes the book to discussing how we can bring about the changes needed to help our students use AI more effectively.

He splits the book into two sections. The first half of the book is devoted to advice for school leaders on how to bring about the needed change. And the second half is devoted to advice for teachers.

How can school leaders provide leadership to effectively implement AI?

Frontier begins his advice for school leaders by suggesting that they “lead by learning.” He urges leaders to help all those in the organization understand the basics of how AI works and what it can do. For example, he advises leaders to help people avoid “anthropomorphizing” AI—to treat AI like it is a human, as in science fiction movies. He uses the example of the student telling the teacher that, “Google told me this.” No, AI is a tool that we use, not a person.

He then urges leaders to “take a transformational approach.” A key issue for leaders in implementing AI is recognizing the distinction between transactional and transformational change. An example of transactional change would be replacing an outdated textbook. And of course this kind of change is often needed.

But to get the greatest benefit from AI, Frontier encourages school leaders to work to bring about transformational change—to change how our students learn in a basic way. He says leaders must “Ask big, transformational questions—those that challenge long-held assumptions, invite new ways of thinking about the nature of the work at hand, and help others break free from the past.”

Although Frontier argues we must move past viewing AI as a way students might cheat, he calls on us to “emphasize integrity.” He recognizes that we must manage academic integrity, and he talks quite a bit about this.

And Frontier advises that we must put “fidelity before efficiency.” He cautions about using AI to achieve efficiency without “fidelity” to the larger goal of ensuring that our students have a rich learning experience.

How can teachers use AI to help our kids learn? How can we use AI with “intention?”

To begin his discussion of how teachers can use AI to improve how students learn, Tony encourages teachers to “stand in their shoes,” and view AI abilities as our students do.

He then calls on teachers to “know your purpose.” A very enlightening discussion is his contrast between the “culture of compliance,” in which our energy is directed to issues such as did our students submit their assignments, and the “culture of learning,” where the focus is on what might our students learn and whether this is happening.

He asks teachers to “prompt AI tools intentionally” and “use AI tools for intentional learning,” to ensure that AI tools are being used with intention and to help our students to become independent learners.

There’s more to do

 “AI with Intention” is a great contribution to understanding the role AI can play in our kids’ learning experience, how we can implement AI effectively, and how we can avoid some dangers of its use.

But there are things “AI with Intention” doesn’t do:

  • It doesn’t review specific AI tools.
  • It focuses on the use of generative AI tools such as Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot, and it doesn’t open the door to even scarier tools such as AI tutors (e.g., Khanmigo).
  • Although it provides examples, these examples tend to relate to older kids.
  • It doesn’t provide a sample action plan for implementing AI.
  • And it doesn’t provide case studies on AI implementations in real districts and schools.

This is not a criticism of the book. “AI with Intention” provides a rich review of the issues involved in ensuring that AI is used “with intention.”

But there’s more to do. To begin, we need to consider how our districts and schools can structure their efforts to use AI and other methods to transform how learning happens with their kids. And we need to check out the actual experience of our fellow districts in how they are successfully or possibly not-so-successfully implementing AI.

And this is where you can help. Have you used AI “with intention” to help your students learn more effectively? If so, don’t be shy—this is the AI moment! This is the time to stand up and tell your story of success, to help all of us make the transformation in learning our kids need, as we enter the age of AI.

The Power and Peril of Phones – Part 3: Managing Devices at School

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This is the final installment of a three-part blog entry on “The Power and Peril of Phones.” In “Part 1: The Power” we looked back at the evolution of computer and communications technology. We marveled at how this technology now provides us with the power to access all the world’s knowledge and communicate with anyone around the world. And, we looked in amazement at how we can access this power with a small portable device that we can hold in our hand.

But we also considered the peril that the very-tempting overuse of this technology and “device addiction” presents, especially for the young. This peril includes decreasing levels of face-to-face human interaction and increasing rates of mental health problems.

Then in “Part 2: What Do Our Schools Need to Do?,” we considered how schools can cope with these challenges. A major focus for schools has been considering various degrees of “bans” on the use of phones at school. The most extreme form of a ban is requiring students to either leave their phones at home or to lock them up for the school day when they arrive at school.

(Courtesy of StockCake)

But even an extreme phone ban at school doesn’t completely solve the problem. This is because we increasingly want to have our students use laptops and other computer devices during the school day to help improve their learning experience. For example, we want to use the power of technology to enable personalized learning, and this requires access to devices. An excellent New York Times article on the perilous place where we have arrived is “Get Tech Out of the Classroom Before It’s Too Late,” by Jessica Grosse. (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/opinion/schools-technology.html)

For years we foresaw a future in which we could provide our students with “1-to-1 device coverage.” Then in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic unexpectedly provided the impetus to make this jump, and to issue each student their own device.

And now, we can use our technology to do things such as enable the giant shift from whole group instruction to a personalized learning model. A leader in this movement has been the Modern Classrooms Project (https://www.modernclassrooms.org), which provides advocacy and facilitation to “lead a movement of educators in implementing a self-paced, mastery-based instructional model that leverages technology to foster human connection, authentic learning, and social-emotional growth.”

And of course, we’re now just beginning to scratch the surface of how artificial intelligence, or AI, can provide even more powerful learning for our students. Except the use of AI runs the danger of increasing the time students spend with their devices even beyond what we have now.

So, how can schools provide technology access for our students in order to give them benefits such as access to powerful personalized learning abilities while also somehow minimizing the negative impact of too much device time? This is the tough challenge we want to address in “Part 3: Managing Devices at School.”

As we mentioned in Part 2, a start in controlling device time is to provide some level of a ban on the use of personal devices during the school day. But if the level of the ban leaves the door open for some use of personal devices during parts of the school day, such as at lunch, the school must find ways to help students to manage their device use during these periods.

To help manage the use of devices, the school and the teachers would be wise to structure the school day into use-a-device periods and no-device periods. The no-device periods would need to begin with the teacher saying something like, “OK everyone, now we are going to close our laptops, and until 9:30 we will be (for example) working with our small groups.”

Of course, we should proclaim recess and lunch periods to be no-device periods, as students are encouraged to interact and engage in unstructured play.

But we need use-a-device periods to enable students to use school-issued devices for technology-enabled learning. As noted above, a very beneficial form of technology-enabled learning is personalized learning, especially for reading and math. And increasingly, students will have access to forms of online tutoring, or possibly automated tutoring. What will continue to be challenging will be the use of devices for more open-ended activity such as research.

One way to both encourage human interaction and to minimize the harmful impact of the excessive of devices is to make use of small group sessions and multi-student projects. In these sessions, students may be accessing technology, but they are doing so as part of their interaction with their fellow students. Their human interaction should increase the benefit of the use of the technology, and it should also help to maintain the focus on the assignment.

Students can also benefit if we provide tutoring from adults in the community or older students. The Greendale (Wisconsin) Schools provides various forms of tutoring, including a “Reading Buddies” program in which each week retirement-age adults and work-at-home parents provide one-on-one reading sessions with all first graders. (https://www.greendaleschools.org/families/school-volunteer-opportunities.cfm)

And, an example of a school which uses older students to provide tutoring for younger students is Milwaukee Parkside School for the Arts. (https://mps.milwaukee.k12.wi.us/Schools/Milw-Parkside-School.htm) Note that tutoring by older students helps both the little guys and also the older students.

As valuable as technology is, especially for younger children, some concepts such as those in math can be taught better if we make use of manipulatives, which provide a tactile experience.

Technology also provides advantages in gaining access to various forms of reading material. But a disadvantage of using devices to access online reading material is that it is easier to lose focus and possibly wander into other uses such as social media (more on that below). So ideally, assignments heavy on reading would ideally favor paper books, which also provide a “tactile” experience.

And especially at the elementary level, students would benefit if we set aside a daily period for reading, in which every student in the class and the teacher quietly devotes some quiet time to doing nothing other than to read a paper book or other material of their choice.

Schools may also wish to look for ways to encourage the reading of full-length books, through activities such as student book clubs.

(I’m so old that when I started school our desks were still bolted to the floor, and we had 35 or more students in a class. When we would do an assignment, everyone would do the same thing, which meant some finished much earlier than others. Our teachers managed this challenge partly by asking us to always have a book in our desk, and to use our spare time upon finishing the assignment to read. Well, I loved to read, and I would rush through the assignment so I could get back to reading my current book.)

For many years, the federal Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) has required schools to have Internet filtering technology. The main intent of this requirement was to enable schools to block content that is inappropriate for younger children. But schools can use their filtering systems to block or limit social media sites such as Facebook and TikTok. Filtering social media sites removes these sites as a distraction, and it also helps to control online bullying.

With YouTube, schools may wish to possibly establish a general ban but maintain a positive list of a library of approved YouTube pages, which teachers can constantly add to though an easy-to-use process.

Considering the amazing power that our modern technology provides for our kids, it’s frustrating that we have to put energy into working in different ways to actually keep the students from using that technology, at least for parts of their school day. But there are critical reasons why we have arrived at a point in time where we now must do this.

But if we do this well, we can have it all! We can maximize the powerful benefits our students realize from our technology, such as personalized learning and tutoring. And, we can also maximize the benefits they receive from human interaction.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could pull this off?

The Power and Peril of Phones – Part 2: What Do Our Schools Need to Do?

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In our last blog post on “The Power and Peril of Phones – Part 1: The Power,” we discussed the great power that our modern smartphones give to the users of the phones. And nowadays, those users are almost everyone.

But we also discussed how the power of the phones is causing negative impacts across our society. One example is how the increased use of phones by kids is a major cause of their worsening mental health.

And the kids cannot help but bring their problems to school. The compulsion of the students to use their phones throughout the school day can cause disruption to normal class activities. And on a higher level, the phones are a contributor to decreasing engagement with school and worsening attendance.

In this blog post, let’s consider how districts and schools are working to address the challenges presented by our kids’ use of phones. And in particular, let’s focus on the efforts of schools to control disruption through the use of various forms of bans on the use of phones at school.

* * * * * * * * *

Kids use their phones a lot—and they have been for a long time.

It is not news that our kids use their phones a lot. A 2023 study by Common Sense found that:

On a typical day, the participants in our study (11-to 17 -year-olds) used their smartphones for a median of almost four and a half hours. However, simply showing average daily smartphone duration across our sample doesn’t tell the whole story. Some participants used their phones for only a few minutes per day, while others averaged over 16 hours a day. [i]

The use of phones by kids is not new. It began with the introduction of the first smartphone, the Apple iPhone, in 2007. But as kids have come to carry their phones along with them wherever they go, and as they feel compelled to use their phones throughout the day, the phones have come to have an increasingly disruptive impact on normal classroom activities.

Banning phones at school is not a new idea, but it is suddenly getting new interest.

One way that districts and schools have sought to deal with this challenge is to implement a variety of types of “bans” on the use of phones in schools. One example is the nation’s largest school district, the New York City Schools.

New York had instituted a ban over a decade ago, but the district found it to be ineffective. The ban was lifted in 2015. Lifting the ban was a campaign promise for Mayor Bill de Blasio, who argued parents needed the phones to be able to contact their children. [ii]

Our Milwaukee Public Schools also once had a similar ban, but also lifted it, as New York did.

But interestingly, in recent months there has been a greatly renewed interest in bans on phones. The New York City Schools are now one of many districts implementing bans or considering doing so. [iii]

And at the state level, a recent analysis by Education Week found that, “As of July 2024, at least 7 states have passed laws or enacted policies that ban or restrict students’ use of cellphones in schools statewide or recommend local districts enact their own bans or restrictive policies.” [iv]

Has the book The Anxious Generation possibly focused attention on phones?

What is it that has sparked this sudden interest in this problem and the partial remedy of banning phones in schools? Part of the answer may simply be that the problem has continued to worsen, and the interest in taking needed measures to finally address the problem in an effective way has finally reached a critical mass. But part of the reason may also be the impact of a recent book, The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt.

The Anxious Generation is currently #1 on the New York Times Best Sellers Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction List, and it has been on the list for 16 weeks. [v]

In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt discusses the forces that have led to the worsening mental health of our children. He identifies the use of phones as one of these forces, and he presents a persuasive argument for banning phones during school hours. He also presents suggestions for how families can manage the use of phones outside of school.

Phone bans can vary in intensity, and some forms of bans are more effective than others.

As we mentioned above, a district may implement a district-wide ban. And some states are even considering statewide bans. But in some situations, such as with a private school, the ban could be only for a single school.

There are several issues with bans on phones in school. These issues include:

  • Whether the bans are being decreed by the state, district, or school
  • The extent of the ban (e.g., Can the student keep their phone in their locker?)
  • How the bans are being implemented

Our table below identifies five potential extents of a ban, in descending order of strictness.

Level 1, prohibiting students from even bringing their phones onto school premises, would seem to be the most effective ban. But a ban of this extent may face the most opposition from parents.

Level 2, the option of allowing a student to bring their phone to school but then to be required to store it in a lockbox during the school day, seems to be more of a compromise. An interesting technology to support this type of ban is a lockable pouch or “sock” to store the phone. Yondr is one vendor that provides these pouches.

Level 3, requiring students to simply leave their phones in their lockers seems less complicated, and probably works well for private schools and smaller campuses.

Level 4, asking students to leave their phones in their pockets probably works less well, especially since students will be tempted to take their phones out in the bathroom, etc.

And Level 5, allowing students to carry their phones about but appealing to them not to disrupt class seems hopeless—the power of the phones is simply too great.

Calling on teachers to somehow suppress the disruptive impact of the use of phones with little or no help from on high seems futile. A recent Education Week article was the tale of “Cellphones Turned My Teaching Career From ‘Awesome’ to Exhausting,” in which a veteran teacher told how his constant battles with phones wore him down and eventually motivated him to quit the profession. [vi]

Of course, the growing use of smartwatches and earbuds and the increasing “wiring” of our students will make the use of bans even more challenging.

Districts and schools have taken creative approaches to bans, and implementing these approaches requires the involvement of teachers, parents, and students.

Implementing a policy to manage the use of phones by students is a challenging undertaking. And to be successful it requires much more effort than merely announcing, “We are now banning phones.”

A recent Edutopia article on “3 Schools, 3 Principals, 3 Cell Phone Bans” provided three excellent case studies and how some schools reconsidered their policies on phones – https://www.edutopia.org/article/cell-phone-bans-schools-principals-weigh-in. [vii]

  • Newburgh Free Academy High School in Newburgh, NY found their Level 3 policy of asking students to keep their phones in their lockers or backpacks wasn’t working well, and the school moved to a Level 2 policy involving the use of pouches.
  • Rogers Park Middle School in Danbury, CT found that leaving the management of phones to teachers was working poorly, and the phones were enabling behavior such as using phones to instigate fights. Rogers Park also moved to a Level 2 policy using pouches.
  • Luxemburg-Casco Middle School in Luxemburg, WI moved to a Level 3 policy of asking students to keep their phones in their lockers.

A common theme to the stories of all three schools is that the principals and school staff members put a lot of energy into involving teachers, parents, and students into planning and implementing the new policies.

One issue they had to address was anxious parents who were concerned about their ability to communicate with their kids during the school day. A partial remedy offered by many schools is simply to ask the kids to come to the office and use the office phone if they need to reach their parents, and to invite the parents to call the office if there is an urgent need to reach the kids.

Students at Rogers Park Middle School (Laurel Golio for Edutopia)

Districts and schools need to think through and implement their policies on phones.

Districts and schools should also think through and publish a policy related to phones. Issues the policy should address include:

  • Define which devices are covered, possibly using the broad category of “personal electronic devices.”
  • Explain how the policy works, and what students need to do with their phones (e.g., Lock the phone in their lockers upon arriving).
  • Reassure students and parents of how they can handle emergencies. (e.g., Use the phone in the office.)
  • Present the consequences of not following the policy.
  • Open the door to exceptions such as using phones in class activities.
  • Provide some regulation of behavior when phones are used, such as not engaging in harassment.
  • Appeal to students to notify staff if they receive inappropriate messages.
  • Require students to not disclose personal information, or user IDs and passwords.

But what else should schools be doing to address our kids’ phone challenges?

But what should schools be doing beyond bans to address our kids’ phone addiction and other challenges with their use of phones?

In the coming days we will do another follow-up blog post – “The Power and Peril of Phones – Part 3: Addressing SEL and Phone Use at Home.” It’s possible you have some ideas. Or, better yet, it’s possible your district or school is already having success with helping kids and their families with their use of phones. If so, please share your ideas or experiences with me at schulzj@jerryschulz.com. Or leave a comment on our blog post.

I hope you have found this valuable, and I’m looking forward to continuing this discussion!

[i]       https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/constant-companion-a-week-in-the-life-of-a-young-persons-smartphone-use

[ii]      https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/nyregion/ban-on-cellphones-in-new-york-city-schools-to-be-lifted.html

[iii]      https://www.edweek.org/technology/school-cellphone-ban-is-critical-for-addicted-students-nyc-chancellor-says/2024/06

[iv]      https://www.edweek.org/technology/which-states-ban-or-restrict-cellphones-in-schools/2024/06

[v]       https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/combined-print-and-e-book-nonfiction

[vi]        https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/cellphones-turned-my-teaching-career-from-awesome-to-exhausting/2024/06

[vii]     https://www.edutopia.org/article/cell-phone-bans-schools-principals-weigh-in.

How to Improve Learning? Many Small Improvements? Or Top-Down “Transformation?”

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What if you had been struggling for years to improve how effectively your children learn? Then suddenly, you were provided with an almost-unlimited amount of money? But you only had a few years to spend it. What would you do?

This is exactly the challenge being faced right now by school districts across the U.S., and they must decide how to spend millions of dollars in federal Covid-19 ESSER relief funds. You could of course easily compile a list of many items that would benefit your kids. But would you also use this as a one-time opportunity to bring about a major transformation in how effectively your kids learn?

Here’s a letter to the editor I wrote that was in the print edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Sunday, July 25.

An Opportunity for MPS

Milwaukee Public Schools will receive more than $500 million in federal stimulus funds. (“MPS making plans for more than $500 million in federal stimulus,” July 21).

The district is now making plans on how to spend this money over the next three years. MPS recently held listening sessions and has developed a list of ideas. Items on the list include tutoring for students and training for teachers. And these are worthy ideas.

But I believe there is one best use of these funds. This is to fund an effort across the district to transform how students learn, with the goal to greatly increase student achievement. One likely emphasis in the transformation would be on the use of personalized learning and the enabling technology. Another would be more movement to the community schools concept.

This won’t be easy. Many similar efforts here and in other cities have failed. But what’s different now is the availability of this funding, along with a forced time window.

And coming off our pandemic experience, do we now also have a motivation that is more intense than in the past? Or are we content to have our children continue to fail to learn? This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. We can’t pass it up.

To Be Synchronous, or to Be Asynchronous—or, Maybe, to Be Neither. That Is the Question.

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This fall we should all finally be able to return to a “new normal” school experience, in the traditional in-person way.

Except one way we were changed by the pandemic is almost all students and their parents have been exposed to some sort of virtual school experience. And some parents will want their districts to continue to offer virtual options for attending school.

(Thanks to Education Week and Andrew Rus/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP.)

For some, this will be because of lingering concerns of infection from COVID-19. But other parents may have come to feel that attending virtually is simply a better way for their children to go to school.

And so, districts will need to make decisions on which models they will—or will not—choose to offer. These decisions won’t be easy. Districts may need to decide not to offer virtual models that students and parents prefer but which the districts determine to not be in the best interest of the students seeking these options, plus also their teachers and the other students.

The biggest issue has to do with the concurrent model.

Alternatives for Providing a Virtual Option

Districts seem to have at least four alternative ways to address expectations for virtual school:

  • Continue to offer a synchronous concurrent option, in which online students can attend in-person classes along with the students who are at school and in the classroom. Synchronous means the class is live. Concurrent means online and in-person students both attend at the same time.
  • Offer special synchronous classes for virtual learners only, grouping together online learners from across the district. So, everyone in the class is virtual.
  • Offer an “asynchronous” virtual option, in which students use technology to access learning materials but don’t necessarily join together at the same time with fellow students in an online class.
  • Decline to offer any virtual option, either synchronous or asynchronous.

Only a year ago, most districts did not offer a virtual option. But with the explosion of the pandemic in March of 2020 districts had to quickly work to keep school going, despite not being able to allow students to be in the building.

Some districts distributed paper texts and materials to their students—kind of “asynchronous,” but without the technology. But most districts adopted virtual solutions. What helped is that many districts had already implemented 1-to-1 device coverage, and others were well on the road there. And districts worked quickly to issue devices to any students who needed them.

This enabled a conversion of existing classes to virtual classes. There was some use of asynchronous virtual classes. But most districts went to synchronous classes—students attended virtually from home, using products such as Google Meet or Zoom, interacting with their teachers who also joined remotely.

In the fall of 2020, most districts returned to face-to-face classes. But many districts also provided a synchronous concurrent option, in which some students could join the class virtually. This accommodated situations such as students having to be out temporarily due to COVID-19 exposure.

But how about the fall of 2021? Why not just continue to allow a synchronous concurrent option?

Not a Good Idea?

There are several reasons why continuing to offer the synchronous concurrent option may not be a good idea.

  • For most students, attending school virtually is just not as effective as attending face-to-face. With traditional schools, students enjoy the structure imposed by the facility and the scheduled school day. And their teachers are on the scene and can more easily ensure that students are engaged throughout the day.
  • The synchronous virtual option requires extra work from our already-overworked teachers, who among other things must ensure there is a virtual alternative for at least some lessons. And they must manage the technology for the virtual sessions.
  • Concurrent classes also provide distractions and possible lost time for everyone—the in-person students, the virtual students, and especially the teachers, as they work to orchestrate the whole scene.
  • And, trying to learn through a virtual session works the most poorly for disadvantaged students and those with special needs.

This is not to say we shouldn’t use technology. The pandemic greatly increased our technology expertise. And providing every student with their own device has opened the door to many effective uses of technology. These uses include supporting personalized learning through the use of powerful adaptive learning software.

And so, the pandemic will hopefully advance our use of technology in learning—except this will work best for children in structured in-school settings.

But if it is not wise to continue synchronous concurrent classes, how can districts satisfy parents seeking a virtual option for their children? One alternative is to group virtual students together into special synchronous-only classes.

Asynchronous Classes—The Most Manageable Option?

But possibly the most manageable alternative is to offer an asynchronous virtual option.

Asynchronous online courses had their start at the college level in the 1990s. Some K-12 districts then began to offer asynchronous virtual programs to appeal to parents who wanted to home school their children, or to accommodate students who were uncomfortable in the traditional school setting. An example is the School District of Waukesha Wisconsin’s eAchieve Academy, which was founded in 2004.

In the 2019-20 school year, 34 of the 50 states allowed districts and charter schools to offer asynchronous virtual school options. And 293,717 of the 50,453,111 students in the U.S., about 0.6%, attended school programs that were fully virtual. [i]

Districts currently without an asynchronous program might be wise to not attempt to build their own program from scratch. An alternative would be to partner with a commercial provider. An example is the School District of Greenfield Wisconsin, which is partnering with the Edmentum provider while also using a district teacher as a digital learning coach. Another alternative would be to collaborate with another district.

Students in Wisconsin also have the option to attend a virtual school in another district through the State’s Open Enrollment program. But they must apply by April 30 for an upcoming school year.

Let’s Think This Through

Some parents and students will reasonably expect their school districts to continue to offer virtual options like those they enjoyed during the pandemic. But districts would be wise to think through which options would be best for all their students.

See also the Education Week article on “Forbidding Remote Learning: Why Some Schools Won’t Offer a Virtual Option This Fall,” at https://www.edweek.org/leadership/forbidding-remote-learning-why-some-schools-wont-offer-a-virtual-option-this-fall/2021/06. The photo above of Tanya Holyfield, a 2nd grade teacher at Manchester Academic Charter School in Pittsburgh, is from this article.

[i]           https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/tables/201920_Virtual_Schools_table_3.asp

Virtual Learning Will Make the New Normal Better. But We Must Still Value Our Human Interactions.

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The New York Times recently ran two articles with different opinions on the value of virtual learning.

In his February 15th article on “Lessons from Virtual Kindergarten,” [i] David Saks talked about how his four-year-old son Kyle will benefit from a return to face-to-face kindergarten.

But in his February 16th article on “I Actually Like Teaching on Zoom,” [ii] Viet Thanh Nguyen argued that continuing the changes brought about by the pandemic will enable his college students to learn more effectively.

They’re both right.

Three things happened to us during the pandemic.

We needed to make more use of technology and tools, and we did. We acquired new devices and other technology.

We all acquired new technology skills, even four-year-olds like Kyle.

And our culture changed. We began interacting in new ways at work, at school, and at home.

We would be wise to realize these are transformative changes. We need to proactively manage them to get their benefits but also to avoid the downsides. Our technology tools can help us to be more productive and connect better with each other. And we can benefit from our experience with virtual learning during the pandemic.

But we also need to cherish all that was best about the old normal—we must be especially vigilant not to let our alluring technology diminish our ability to have normal human interactions. And how this works will vary depending on the age of the humans involved.

Mr. Saks was right on the money regarding Kyle—four-year-old children need intense human interaction, and their screen time, although somewhat inevitable today, needs to be carefully controlled.

Professor Nguyen’s college students are towards the other end of the education age spectrum. They grew up with screens, and they can benefit from virtual learning in some ways. But whether we’re four or one hundred and four, we need to prioritize those face-to-face human interactions.

[i]    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/opinion/kindergarten-remote-learning-covid.html.

[ii]   https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/opinion/zoom-video-school-teaching.html#:~:text=And%20much%20is%20horrible%3A%20teachers,the%20human%20connection%20attenuated%20online

When We Provide Learning Technology to Disadvantaged Kids, “Just OK” Is Not OK Anymore

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The Covid-19 shift to school-at-home since last spring has helped us see how far we have progressed in our use of technology for learning—and where we must do better.

Many districts quickly issued computer devices to students for use at home. But other districts struggled to supply devices to their students. This was especially so in urban districts that serve many disadvantaged students.

So, what to do?

To start, let’s stop being content to just wring our hands over how disadvantaged kids consistently get short-changed in the provision of technology. Instead, let’s take inspiration from the TV ads that declare, “Just OK is not OK anymore.” We must insist that all our kids now need to enjoy a basic standard of learning technology.

But what are the basics that every student needs to have?

All students must have an appropriate computer device for use at school and at home. We have had computers in our schools since the early 1980s. But for years we rationed time in computer labs at the end of the hall. It was only recently that the falling prices of laptops and tablets made it feasible to give students easy access to devices.

Some districts had moved to “1-to-1” coverage and assigned each student their own device, sometimes letting them take the devices home. Education Week reported that, “In February (2020) … the EdWeek Research Center surveyed teachers (and found) about 57 percent said each student in their schools had a device. That percentage increased slightly, to 59 percent, when teachers were surveyed again in May.” [i]

But this coverage was more common in districts with fewer disadvantaged kids. We must now ensure every student has a device for school and home. And as students are returning this fall it seems that we are close to 100 percent—the expectation now is simply that the district issues each student a device.

If students do not have Internet access the district must issue them an Internet hotspot—and ideally provide wired access for the home. But we may not yet be quite to 100 percent in ensuring that all students have the Internet connectivity needed to make those devices work. Here again, disadvantaged kids have been losing out. In an analysis of 2015 Census data, the Pew Research Center found that, “roughly one-third (35%) of households with children ages 6 to 17 and an annual income below $30,000 a year do not have a high-speed internet connection at home, compared with just 6% of such households earning $75,000 or more a year. These broadband gaps are particularly pronounced in black and Hispanic households.” [ii]

A model of how to address this challenge is the Des Moines Public Schools, where 76.8% of the 32,545 students qualify for Free and Reduced Meals. [iii] Last spring DMPS issued Internet hotspots to quickly provide access at homes for those who needed them. The district then worked with an Internet provider to “install wiring and activate high-speed internet service for families designated by DMPS.” [iv]

This access incurs new costs. Federal E-Rate funds can help. In Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Public Schools’ private foundation and the City Forward Collective nonprofit worked to raise private funds. [v] And the recently introduced “Emergency Educational Connections Act” could provide up to $4 billion in federal funds. [vi]

But districts can’t wait to ensure Internet access until the feds or others fund this. As with all the other necessary parts of a child’s education, ensuring Internet access for kids who otherwise lack it now needs to be part of the job of every school district.

This still leaves the tough problem of a lack of broadband access in rural areas.

School-issued devices need to be pure business. Devices can also provide a powerful distraction. They must be carefully configured so they can only be used for learning functions.

The devices need all the right learning “stuff.” These devices must be set up to access the educational content and software that gives them their power. This begins with the Google G Suite or Microsoft Office 365 productivity suites. But possibly the most valuable use of the devices is to provide adaptive learning software that enables personalized learning for reading and math.

Districts must have integrated SIS and LMS systems. Teachers need to post resources and assignments and communicate with students. This requires some combination of student information system (SIS) gradebook and learning management system (LMS) software. LMS products such as Schoology provide district-wide, top-down support. One advantage of the LMS products is the district can work to integrate student, class, assignment, and grade data between the district’s SIS (and gradebook) and LMS. So teachers shouldn’t have to labor to key this data in or, worse yet, key things like assignments and grades into both systems.

An alternative to products like Schoology is the Google Classroom LMS, which is popular with teachers partly because it can be independently implemented in a bottom-up way. Also, it’s free.

In any event, the Covid-19 experience has raised the bar for LMS use, and districts that until now made do without a district-wide LMS will need to concentrate energy and funds in this area.

Schools need to use technology to engage modern parents. Schools and teachers need SIS portals, LMS systems, and notification technology such as BrightArrow to engage parents. And teachers need the technology to text parents without using their personal phones. Here again, the bar for communication has been permanently raised.

Districts must manage their larger technology picture and provide professional learning for teachers. Teachers already has the toughest job in town—and since last spring it has become tougher yet. Districts must work with their teachers to develop a unified technology approach with components such as standard software tied to the curriculum. They then must provide professional learning and one-on-one coaches to help each teacher put these resources to work. And of course, our teachers need deluxe devices.

. . . . . . . . . .

We’re trying to figure out the post-Covid-19 “new normal.” The new normal for learning technology must be that all our students get the same advanced level of technology.

In the midst of the pandemic we also found ourselves amid the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. These demonstrations are about things in addition to education. But our country has arrived at a place where all our people—and certainly all our children—must share in the same benefits of living in the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation in history. We must equip all our kids for the challenging future they face. The best learning technology along with our great teachers can help us do that. Just OK is no longer OK.

[i]    Bushweller, K., “How COVID-19 Is Shaping Tech Use. What That Means When Schools Reopen,” Education Week, June 4, 2020

[ii]   Auxier, B., and Anderson, M., “As Schools Close Due to the Coronavirus, Some U.S. Students Face a Digital ‘Homework Gap’,” Pew Research Center, March 16, 2020.

[iii] https://www.dmschools.org/about/facts-figures.

[iv]   https://www.dmschools.org/2020/04/dmps-mediacom-connect-students-for-distance-learning.

[v]   St. Onge, N., “MPS Foundation and City Forward Collective Trying to Bridge Technology Gap for Milwaukee Students,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, June 8, 2020.

[vi]   https://www.baldwin.senate.gov/press-releases/emergency-educational-connections-act.