PATI 4 - Perspectives
"There is WiFi on Mt Everest! There are ZERO excuses for our students to not have WiFi access in their schools and homes."
-Tom Murray
-Tom Murray
Ready to embark on a fresh initiative that affects every student and staff member? Maybe, you want to launch Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT), put Chromebooks or iPads in the hands of every student at the middle school. There are several problems that will pop up, but one of the most difficult (aside from shifting attitudes, behaviors of human beings) and expensive is finding out your network isn't up to your vision.
Before you do anything, make sure your technology infrastructure is ready to go, that all your ecosystems are matched. If not, you are in for a turbulent journey.
Sonny Magana has made a significant contribution to innovation in education with his important book, Disruptive Classroom Technologies, and the T3 Framework. There have been 161 meta-analyses on various aspects of computers in education – from 10,226 studies, and the average effect is d =.34 – and this effect has not changed over the past 50 years despite phenomenal changes in the technology.
A major reason for this lack of impact is most technological interventions do not change the dominant “tell and practice” teaching model. Moving beyond translation and transforming current practice to transcendent uses of technology is clearly where we should go.
We need to build collaborative communities of students solving problems, explaining to others (regardless of ability) and using the social media aspects of technology to change classroom conversations from monologue to dialogue, increasing student impact questions, and allowing errors to be stated and dealt with – this can be so transcendental.
This is the core of Magana’s claims, and indeed this is how we’ll see technology really make the difference we’re after!
John Hattie, Laureate Professor, Deputy Dean of MGSE, Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute, Melbourne Graduate School of Education University of Melbourne, Victoria,Australia ;Chair, Board of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership; Associate Director of the ARC-SRI: Science of Learning Research Centre: http://www.slrc.org.au