How Technology SHOULD Transform Education

so a couple days ago i'm looking around on youtube  and this video pops up on my feed published by the economist called how technology will transform  your kids education and initially i was really pleased to see that video because there's actually  not a lot that's discussed in national news about how technology can have a positive  impact on education the majority of the conversation is around when can we get back to  in-person classrooms as soon as possible so i took a look at the video i als

o took a look at the  comments and there's a whole plethora of anti-tech sentiments in there it's kind of interesting  you should check it out the video definitely brings up some valid points like the fact that  the education sector has been particularly slow to adopt new technologies they also make the  argument that the pandemic galvanized a tech celebration in education which i definitely agree  with but unfortunately where the video is lacking a little bit is in the way that it describes how

  technology can be used to transform education so it focuses primarily on two main categories  one of those is personalized learning programs where students are basically on a program  that's using artificial intelligence to assess students current skill levels and then give them  lessons and resources at their exact skill level and then they also focus on this kind of random  program where some teachers at a teacher education school are teaching avatars of students as opposed  to real students

as a way to build their skills interested in you know what life was like for the  boy i do think personalized learning will likely play a significant role in the future of education  and sure maybe we can also practice our teaching skills by teaching avatars of students rather than  real ones but i think there are clearly some other more impactful ways that we can use technology  to transform education and i also think that if some of the people who express negativity  in the comments heard the

se arguments i might be able to change their mind and i know that's  true because i used to be a tech skeptic myself first technology is the most practical way to  help educators build interactive classrooms even though decades of research show that active  participation is more effective for learning there's still a decent amount of resistance  to that model educators because they've mostly known just one way of teaching and learning for  most of their lives and that's probably how they experie

nced education just like how i experienced  education but then students can also be resistant to the idea of active participation too why  because active participation is hard i recently experienced this for myself in a class that i'm  taking about storytelling part of the class takes place online and the direct instruction usually  happens via video i've watched all the videos and done all the activities and i started  thinking to myself hey i'm learning how to do this storytelling thing at lea

st that's what  i thought the most recent assignment was that i actually had to tell a story to the rest of the  entire group over zoom and it was way harder than i anticipated it turns out that watching the  videos and doing the activities wasn't quite enough in fact i haven't felt so uncomfortable  in a very long time i wanted to slink away and find a place to hide but did i learn something  much deeper about storytelling by actually having to go through the action of telling one absolutely  n

ow of course active participation doesn't require technology you can randomize calling on students  with popsicle sticks you can do turn and talks you can give students mini whiteboards so they write  their responses down but with technology tools like paradec nearpod whiteboard 5 just to name a  few you can pretty much instantly turn a passive participation class into a classroom where 100 of  students participate throughout an entire lesson the teacher can see their responses coming through  i

n real time and you can pull reports after the fact that you can use to make decisions about how  to group students you can also use those reports for parent conferences and so on technology also  helps teachers extend active participation beyond interactive presentations to creating interactive  content every single teacher in the world gives students articles to read videos to watch web  pages to visit as a way for students to gather more information about whatever it is that they're  learning

the problem it's virtually impossible for teachers to know if students are understanding  the material and perhaps more importantly it's just as challenging for students to know  whether or not they're getting the key ideas while they're reading that article or watching  that video that's because most the time we wait until after they've read the article or watched  the video or visited the webpage to ask them comprehension questions but the problem is that if  a student has challenges with com

prehension like many students do or if we are exposing students  to texts or concepts that are a little bit above their level then just asking questions at the  very end isn't doing anything to support them with increasing comprehension what does support  increasing comprehension is chunking text and videos into smaller segments and then embedding  checks for understanding to help students hone in on key ideas it's a simple shift but using edtech  apps to turn all static content into interactive

content helps make learning more sticky for  students it helps teachers better understand what their students know and don't know it helps  students self-monitor their own understanding and it also frees up educators time to actually  be doing some small group instruction and teaching instead of grading those types of activities  it's pretty much an undisputable win-win that would be almost impossible to achieve  without technology and if you're looking for ways to make your static content inte

ractive the  next time you want to play a video just go check the edpuzzle library to see if it's already been  made interactive by other educators and if you want to supplement your curriculum with an article  hop over to actively learn to see if there's an article that's already been made interactive in  that platform and if you want to assign students a web page you can even upload it into actively  learn and add interactive questions to that as well if you're going to have students check out

  images just upload that image to a program like cami which will make it interactive so students  can draw directly on top of it to make meaning out of it that leads me to the next point about  how technology can be used to transform education and that's to help make learning more accessible  accessibility means a lot of different things but it really boils down to this how can we stretch  out our hand to meet students where they're at rather than expecting students to learn what we're  teachin

g no matter where they're at one clear way the technology can help us make learning more  accessible is through asynchronous instruction so rather than or in addition to teaching on a  physical whiteboard with a marker if we use a digital whiteboard and a screen recording tool we  can then preserve that lesson for students to be able to watch on their own time at their own pace  and you can still have paper copies of lessons and resources and things like that it's just that  digitizing your curr

iculum makes it inherently more accessible of course accessibility extends  far beyond just making lesson materials more available technological tools help educators open  up their curriculums in ways that would be very challenging to do without technology for example  if a student struggles with reading or writing they can use a speech-to-text or text-to-speech  tool and in general technology just helps us give students multiple means of accessing the  information that we're teaching so instead

of expecting students to all learn information  from the single textbook that we use in class we can offer them leveled text so that they're  reading that information at their just right level we can give them video audio recordings multimedia  rich presentations web page resources and so on what's more technology helps us expand what  counts as academic in our classrooms there's really no reason to limit students to showing  their understanding through traditional means of assessment like quiz

zes essays and presentations  we don't have to get rid of those entirely but we can also give students the opportunity to show  what they've learned through making a podcast by creating a video by designing a solution to a  real world problem and then printing that solution out using a 3d printer unless we make an effort  to change what school means school will forever be something that works for some students and doesn't  work for others we can change that and technology can play a key role in

how we pull it off and  that leads me to my last point about a key way technology can transform education and that's  helping students take greater ownership over their own learning helping students take greater  ownership over their own learning is one of the most profound shifts that we can make in our  classrooms it's a shift that dramatically impacts both teachers and students one of the main  reasons why teaching is so stressful and tiring is that it often feels like we're the ones doing  a

ll the heavy lifting in class and students often feel a lack of control over their day-to-day lives  and feel as though compulsory k-12 education has been forced upon them and that's often the reason  why students act out in class when i first started teaching i was literally the world's worst teacher  my first year was absolute living hell it was so bad i don't think there was ever a moment my  entire first year when every kid in the classroom was sitting in their seat at the same time in  fact

it was so bad that a fight once broke out in my class and i didn't even know that the  fight had happened because my class was just that chaotic my first year teaching i gained about  25 pounds practically became an alcoholic and broke up with my girlfriend of over five years  i truly hated my life and at that time i hated teaching now my experience was definitely on the  negative side of the spectrum and it was largely because i totally lacked the skills necessary to  be an effective teacher a

nd i'm not gonna lie it's not like i made some change that transformed  everything overnight but what i did learn is that the more responsibility i transferred to  my students the easier my job became and the more my students were learning there are lots of  steps we can take to cultivate student agency in our classrooms but the most important step that  i took was helping students understand exactly where they're at academically and then understand  exactly what they need to do in order to impr

ove tracking one's own data and progress toward  reaching goals is an extensively documented research-based way to help people achieve what  they want to achieve in life it's how i personally went from only being able to swim maybe one  length of a pool and run a couple of miles to being able to swim 2.4 miles bike 112 and run  26.2 back to back in a single day without stopping it's also a key suggestion that james clear  makes in his best-selling book atomic habits about effective ways to chang

e habits and improve  now yes of course students could do all of this data tracking on paper but technology makes  it indisputably easier for students to track their progress over the course of a single year  and even across multiple years it also makes it a lot less likely that they're going to lose  their tracker at the bottom of their backpack and it's not just self-progress monitoring  students can also curate their own work to store in a digital portfolio and then they can  reflect on how t

hat work shows their learning growth over an extended period of time you can  easily create a data tracker in google sheets and i'll put the link to be able to download the  one that i just showed in the video description and if you're interested in learning more about  how to use digital portfolios in your classroom to have students curate work and reflect  on it and even use that for a student-led conference then i highly recommend you check  out that playlist above to learn all about it