(The following contains copied sections from the various sections of the publication, Independent School Magazine. The articles can be read in their entirety by clicking on the links)
Independent School Magazine - Volume 4 Number 72 Summer 2013
The Great Disruption
Technology and the Future of Schools
The Third Great American Revolution
More than anything, revolutionaries are dreamers.
The third great American revolution — which is part of a larger global revolution — is occurring now, in 2013, around this great country and the world. It’s a dream of educational revolutionaries regarding how we define schooling in the increasingly open Internet age. It’s a dream that, when manifest, is destined to have as large an impact on America — and the world — as the first two revolutionary dreams.
But revolution is dangerous and hard.
This third revolutionary game-changer is made possible by the advent of the Internet, particularly by the democratized access to information and knowledge, and the ability of literally anyone to be a creator of information and knowledge. It is a great equalizer — a tool fueling a new vision of human society.
Revolutionaries are dreamers.
I believe that, like the Dutch sailors in The Great Gatsby, our forward-looking educators are among our explorers in this enchanted moment, compelled into a philosophic contemplation — perhaps even holding their breath in excitement — about what schools can become in the coming decades of the 21st century. We literally live in a time when we will reinvent teaching, learning, and schools — in service to a better society.
But revolution is dangerous and hard.
Skeptics and naysayers abound, of course. They’ll argue that technology is mostly an expensive distraction. They’ll try to convince us that colleagues won’t buy into a 1:1 laptop or tablet program. They’ll say that colleges aren’t particularly interested in such educational experimentation.
But mounting evidence of the transformational power of Internet-based technology on learning makes it clear that these new initiatives in teaching and learning hold great promise — for all children. Indeed, for all of us. That new shore is now before you.
Patrick F. Bassett, president of NAIS.
The Best Way to Predict the Future Is to Invent It Harnessing Technology in Schools, Milton Chen
Perhaps those living in the 15th century, after the invention of the printing press, or during the 20th century’s diffusion of the telephone, radio, cinema, and television, also sensed a similar shifting of the ground beneath their feet. Each wave of media spreads knowledge more rapidly than previously possible — and to many more individuals across social strata.
Now, we have crossed another threshold, one that 20 years ago seemed but a glimmer in a futurist’s eye. A new landscape of learning, working, and living is coming into sharper focus.
It’s a time in which everyone — notably those in our younger generations — can be a producer of knowledg e, not just a consumer of someone else’s knowledge.
The recent economic recession has taught painful lessons about the shifting realities of the 21st-century job market, with some jobs being replaced by technology and others migrating to lower-wage countries. What seems clear, however, is that the missions of many independent schools — to educate students who are critical thinkers, who can collaborate and lead well, and who have global perspectives — are vital.
Today, we can see, more clearly than even three years ago, how technology can enable learning “anytime, anyplace, any pace.”
And independent schools are rising to this challenge.
Many more schools are moving to provide every student with access to digital learning during and after the school day, along with professional development for every teacher. Just in the past two years, the independent school community has seen the launch of the Global Online Academy, the Online School for Girls, and the first Online Education Symposium for Independent Schools, held this year in Los Angeles.
Changing our thinking about the nature of teaching and learning is the most difficult challenge we face, not unlike changing our political system or improving our environment. Entrenched interests and time-honored habits obstruct new approaches, including the fact that, once upon a time, we were all students. As Allen Glenn, former dean of the University of Washington school of education, says, “The biggest obstacle to school change is our memories.”
The six “edges” of innovations, the framework for Education Nation. These “edges” are rapidly converging to redesign the American educational system.
The Thinking Edge
Instead of the either-or debates that have characterized so much of education reform (phonics vs. whole language, computational skills vs. mathematical thinking, face-to-face instruction vs. online courses), it’s time we take a both-and approach — weave the best traditional elements of teaching with inventive digital learning to create a truly fresh approach to education.
This blended approach integrating digital learning with the power of face-to-face relationships, between teachers and students and among students as peer tutors, is proving more effective than either alone.
I often ask educators to maintain the same mindset regarding technology that they seek to instill in their students: curious, open, and persistent. I also ask heads and faculty, especially those who may be resistant to technology in the classroom, three questions: (1) Do you use a computer? (2) Would you give up your computer? (3) Would you share your computer with three other people? Nearly everyone answers “Yes” to the first and “No” to the last two, begging the question of why we would deny students access to the same tools that adult educators benefit from every day.
The Edge of Curriculum and Assessment
For far too long, we have prized abstraction in the classroom at the expense of relevance. Now, many schools are redefining what is taught and how it’s assessed, with an emphasis on real-world relevance and performance-based assessment.
Four words and an equal sign express this movement:
School Life = Real Life
One of the clearest benefits of technology in the classroom has been its role in connecting students with their peers, other teachers, and experts outside their own community.
The Technology Edge
Today, the declining cost of technology together with its increasing power enable us to provide what I like to call “weapons of mass instruction” to every student, around the world. Estimates show the costs of a mobile tablet or laptop PC rival the costs of textbooks, at about $200 per student per year, for hardware, software, broadband access, and professional development for teachers.
Education is an information-intensive enterprise. Previously, we have not had convenient ways of capturing and displaying information generated by students and teachers. Today, technology supports the presentation and analysis of information from many sources, including students’ own learning.
One exciting frontier of technology involves recording student performance and progress. In sports and the arts, technology has often been used to record performance and play it back for learners to review and analyze, as often as they need to. “Record and playback” is what technology was made to do, and it can be applied to literacy, mathematics, and other academic subjects.
The Edge of Time and Place
Now that Web-based information is “always on,” learning can now occur 24/7/365 rather than be limited to the school calendar of 6/5/180.
The Co-Teaching Edge
Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has underscored one of the essential limitations of 20th-century education: “Teaching has been an activity done behind closed doors between moderately consenting individuals.”
In fact, given that specialization in nearly every profession today requires people to work in collaborative teams. It’s increasingly rare that one professional knows everything needed to produce a product, diagnose an illness, or teach a class.
Teachers should also recognize that other experts can complement their knowledge and relationships.
Parents should be valued coeducators for their children as well. Teacher-parent-student relationships are aided by school communication platforms where parents are informed of school homework and projects and their roles in ensuring that the learning continues at home.
The Youth Edge
Today’s youth are the first generation to carry powerful mobile devices wherever they go. They are used for instant access to information and their entire social network. They learn in fundamentally different ways than those of us over-40 (and certainly those of us way-over-40) and they are teaching us how to restructure a new educational system that will serve them and future generations best.
Their skills are important “learning resources” for the digital classroom. Starting in the primary grades, students can become teaching assistants and peer tutors for each other, especially in sharing their technology prowess.
Given all said in favor of technology in schools, the concerns of educators who hesitate to embrace it is understandable. The danger is in letting the technology tail wag the learning dog. We need to make sure it always remains in service to our core educational goals. To that end, one recommendation is to organize a school-wide and family-wide technology-free day. Because the Internet and our mobile devices have become such an accepted part of our minute-by-minute lives, it’s worth pausing to recognize the importance of both face-to-face interaction and personal alone time. We need to turn away from our screens on occasion and look carefully at ourselves and our surroundings.
Our institutions of learning, including schools and libraries in particular, risk falling out of step with the generation of people who are coming of age today. In the late 1990s, the same thing happened to the recording industry. A student at Northeastern University, Shawn Fanning, created a disruptive force — Napster — and in a matter of months had tipped the scales against an old distribution model for recorded entertainment in favor of a new, direct, digital model.
The analogy between recorded music and learning in a digital age is imprecise. But it is not irrelevant. Schools need to listen carefully to students and better understand the ways in which they are learning — and the ways in which they are failing to learn adequately.
We ignore our students and their preferred ways of learning at our peril. But we would be making an equally grave mistake by simply turning our great institutions into a field of computer-based correspondence schools, competing with each other to see who can provide the splashiest and most efficient distance learning.
Independent schools — both day and boarding — are environments in which connected learners can thrive. By design, students are connected to peers and adults not just in the classroom, but also in their clubs, artistic and musical endeavors, and sports teams. Learning goes on many more hours per day, in integrated fashion, than it does in most public schools. Some of our campuses have museums and laboratories; others have museums and laboratories a subway or bus ride away. Adults in independent schools have a bigger canvas to work with in order to connect these experiences for students. If the teachers I work with are any indication, independent schools are packed with devoted educators with active, curious minds and a hunger to teach as effectively as they can.
Of the many venues in which connected learning can take place in an independent school, three stand out as opportunities: at the margins of the curriculum, at the core of the curriculum, and as a form of public outreach.
At the Margins of the Curriculum
At the margins of the curriculum, connected learning means making available positive experiences for students that they would ordinarily not have in their core studies.
imagine that a small group of students has an interest in studying Japanese in a school that doesn’t have a Japanese teacher. A traditional way to meet this need might be to structure an independent project for the few students who want to pursue this course of study, and hire a teacher to support the students. A connected learning approach would call for teaming up with other independent schools to offer an online, partially peer-driven course in Japanese. The Global Online Academy exemplifies this latter approach, in which schools have formed a consortium to offer a series of networked courses that are otherwise not offered at those individual schools.
At the Core of the Curriculum
At the core of the curriculum, connected learning involves improvements to traditional, existing approaches to teaching.
In a math class, a teacher might use contests, puzzles, or games (online or offline) to excite students whose love of math has yet to show itself. In a chemistry class, a teacher might use an interactive tablet application to make the course materials and problem sets more effective, adjusting the rate of new material introduced and the mode of teaching it as data flow in about each student’s performance.
For Public Outreach
As a form of public outreach, connected learning can enable an independent school to share its resources more widely with those who are not among its student body.
Schools might take a functional approach: think not of “sharing” but of “building brand value” by offering materials to students who otherwise might never learn of their offerings. Independent schools might take a cue from what MIT did in launching OpenCourseware, a project that involves the sharing of teaching materials online.
A school might offer interactive experiences for younger students as part of its admissions process that would improve the school’s reach and broaden the kinds of assessment that an admissions officer could draw upon.
A school might offer blended programs in which students come to the campus for a short period of time and rely upon distance-learning methods and social media to connect with peers and teachers for the rest of the year. A school with a library, archive, or museum might digitize some of its learning materials to share with the world via projects such as the Digital Public Library of America.
Assess and Improve
Assessment of learning outcomes is an essential component of any educational change movement. A crucial aspect of connected learning is to assess carefully whether new approaches improve outcomes for students. Independent schools can and should be leaders in assessment of pedagogical innovation.
Ambitious new pedagogical approaches do not need to, and should not, come with wholesale abandonment of what’s worked before. Independent schools need to be actively engaged, with and for our students, in the experimentation and assessment business to avoid missing a major change in education.
Developments in digital technologies — including, but not limited to, the rise in the number of portable devices we observe students using daily — have reached the point at which schools must call into question the form and function of one of the mainstays of the K–12 classroom: the printed book.
Pundits of the digital medium see the promise of interactive textbooks that allow teachers not only to offer course content, but also to check comprehension, embed relevant videos, poll students, or incorporate recent discoveries in order to keep the texts up to date. They also see the promise of hyperlinking multiple texts and/or materials, a process that brings a new understanding to the term intertextuality. In short, they see all learners (teachers, too!) having a more intimate experience with the materials used in courses, including the ability to link and even alter those materials, should they so choose.
Depending on your perspective as an educator, the intensely iterative nature of the digital technologies driving this seeming revolution in books is either a boon or a curse. Educators excited by digital technology see every new development in digital books as yet another way of rethinking a book’s utility. Yet, as traditional bibliophiles point out, the pace and nature of technological change are difficult for schools to manage — thus, the curse. For the digital resisters, it is not only a matter of time and money, but of programmatic continuity.
The resistance to digital books is sure to remain with us for some time. Consider that, in centuries past, amateurs of scrolls bemoaned the innovation of codices, and amateurs of codices bemoaned the innovation of the movable-type printing press, both for similar reasons. Codices and the printing press were disruptive innovations, yet it would be difficult to argue that the dissemination and concatenation of human knowledge suffered as a result of them. Quite the contrary.
At this moment, caught as we are in the earliest stages of this next chapter in the history of the book, it may be difficult to see the value of all the digital innovations, and it may be challenging for schools to manage, but digital books represent an important step forward in human knowledge, education, and interconnectivity.
The Digital Book Landscape
At this point in the evolution of digital books, we know that early pioneers are seeing success.
The ease of creating and personalizing these books is resonating with all audiences, and they are now realizing that quality [K–12 materials are] within reach of everyone.
If the successes of the early pioneers in digital books are any indication, the future is bright. Digital texts have the ability to change schools: to change how we do school, rather than just change which texts we use.
The traditional textbook is limited in terms of its functionality: it contains texts, images, practice problems, and the like, yet it is constructed around a singular mode of literacy: reading. We might better term it “traditional literacy.” While reading remains a critical skill for all learners, it is not the only form of literacy. Therein lies the impetus for pioneers of digital teaching and learning: emerging literacies, many of which live in the digital realm, require our attention.6 Whether digital storytelling, video-gaming, fan fiction, video and music remixing, or social networking (among others), it is clear that our world now requires these new forms of literacy from our students.
Traditional textbooks do not allow for the integration of these literacies into the daily preparation of students, let alone prompt them to consider how to employ these literacies in anything they might produce as learners. Viewed through that lens, traditional textbooks are not structured around the acquisition and promotion of 21st-century skills. Digital texts, however, can be constructed expressly to fulfill that function, especially since students can participate more directly in their learning through the medium of the textbook itself.
The Independent School Experience
One particularly attractive feature of digital books is their adaptability to various learning environments.
As Bob Lane, academic dean at Kildonan School, explains, “The interactive and multisensory nature of an iBook, which our teachers can create specifically for their classes, can make texts come alive for our students. Gone are the days of flat, static textbooks; we welcome ‘books’ with video clips and 3D manipulative objects!”
Harry Neilson, Latin instructor at Tower Hill School (Delaware), has created a FlexBook for his semester elective on the letters of the Roman author Pliny the Younger; his students, as part of a larger project, create content for the book as well. Neilson mentions that creating a digital book with his students has exceeded all his expectations.
“I underestimated the willingness and ease with which they engaged with the material presented digitally,” he says. “The perceptive and thought-provoking comments they posted for each of my chapters proved to me the value of a digital book as a learning experience. In addition, by adding their own chapters to the book, they gained ownership of their own learning. Creating a FlexBook illustrated with images and embedded video helped to dissolve some of the mystery of antiquity and make it more applicable to the students’ daily lives.”
Roberta Berman, head shop teacher at Bank Street School for Children (New York), is creating a digital text called The Art of Shop, meant to provide a fine arts approach to woodworking, to be published by Bank Street College of Education on iTunes U.
Berman notes that the multimedia book “includes step-by-step curricula for ages K–8, transcribed emergent conversations with children while they are sculpting, and a historical perspective on why this work is so valuable in the development of the whole child.”
The Both-And Proposition
It is necessary to put some of the arguments in favor of digital books in context.
Printed books offer something entirely different: a sensorial engagement of a medium that stems from a living source, a tree. Interestingly enough, it may turn out that the traditional book — the codex — is more durable than the digital text, since we do not yet know how well these texts will be maintained and remain searchable in the future, given how frequently we see changes in their hardware (tablets, ereaders, etc.) and in the software used to operate them. Schools, then, will continue to use printed texts not only for reasons of sensorial engagement, but also for continuing a human experience that has defined us for the past 2,000 years: the interaction between reader and codex. There is room for both approaches to the word: notwithstanding the aggressive growth of digital texts, every year more books are printed than in the previous year.
The Challenges
What are the next stages in this evolution in books?
it is clear that independent schools must address certain challenges and opportunities. Seven are presented here. Though not exhaustive, they are meant to serve as food for thought and, more important, action.
- We are in the midst of a paradigm shift. Our understanding of a book is evolving from a printed text — with high-quality information, but unchanging except through printing of new editions — to an electronic text that contains high-quality customizable content. Do we see this shift as an improvement to teaching and learning, and to our ability to deliver on our school missions?
- How do we cite or refer to digital texts, whether in academic work or in the classroom? Opening a book to a certain page will no longer be as ubiquitous an occurrence as it is today; instead, teachers will have to curate and organize digital information in such a way that they create neologisms for identifying “where we are” in the sources. Is it a location, aplace, or is it something entirely different?
- How do we ensure the quality of content, specifically in self- or team-generated digital books?
- How do we handle the constant change in devices and platforms for digital texts? Is acclimating ourselves to this kind of change a cultural issue inasmuch as it is a technology issue?
- With digital book platforms offering so much interactivity, does it make sense for schools to choose a learning management system (LMS) in addition to vibrant, interactive platforms for digital texts?7 Are they becoming indistinguishable from each other?
- Must educators who prefer to keep teaching the way they have been teaching for years embrace digital texts as part of a school’s overall strategy for teaching and learning? How will schools address the balance of (or, the tension between) a paper-text-based pedagogy and a digital-text-based pedagogy?
- With all the desultory construction of language and ideas evidenced in social media, how do schools, in creating and using digital texts, combat what many educators consider to be a globalization of superficiality of thought?
at some point in the near future, the notion of “taking out” one’s book will be somewhat of an anachronism in many classes, though it will persist in others. Increasingly, students will be using mobile devices (laptops, tablets, and whatever else comes down the pike) to house their primary and secondary sources for classes, not to mention their calendars, project management grids, and related learning tools. It stands to reason that digital texts will play a prominent role in that kind of ecosystem.
Yet the immediate demise of the printed text is not upon us; there is no revolution. What is upon us is the third major evolution in how we systematize and disseminate knowledge. With books and courses being constructed in a digital environment, we are bound to interact differently with them, and they are bound to interact differently with each other. Our charge as educators is to explore how we might align the human experience we call learning with that evolution. Independent schools, populated as they are with world-class explorers, represent the ideal proving grounds for digital texts. It is not a question of dismantling libraries and banning printed texts. Rather, it is about participating in and shaping the development of a powerful new medium that is used to disseminate knowledge.
While we carefully oversee other areas of their lives, many of us are unintentionally negligent when it comes to their digital experiences. Though we may be uncomfortable with the full scope of our responsibility in the digital world, ignoring it won’t make it go away.
Why Teach Digital Citizenship?
Our work in school always focuses on creating good citizens, and digital citizenship is just another fold in the nuanced fabric of childhood development. But digital citizenship needs particular attention today because of the divide between the analog (offline) and digital (online) life of children.
Research by Common Sense Media, an independent nonprofit working with parents and educators to improve kids’ lives in a world of media and technology, found that “our nation’s children spend more time with media and digital activities than they do with their families or in school, which profoundly impacts their social, emotional, and physical development.”1
When technology lived primarily in a computer lab and there was limited digital access at home, the gap between a child’s analog and digital life was clear. With the ubiquity of personal devices, and an increasing number of shared devices and 1:1 programs in schools, the gap is gone.
In a school that prides itself on academic excellence and character development, digital citizenship needs to be woven throughout all core curricular areas. It needs to be relevant to students’ lives and integrated into their everyday learning and living. The conversations need to start in the early years and continue throughout the course of their educational careers. Each grade level needs to address age-appropriate issues and build on the understanding of the year before. These dialogues need to evolve as children become more sophisticated and as the technology evolves.
Helping Parents in Their Role
it is crucial that schools involve parents in teaching digital citizenship from the onset. They can guide parents in responsibly overseeing their children’s digital lives at home and in building a collective vision of a digital citizen. If the education about one’s digital life happens only at school, many parents don’t feel empowered to guide the digital behavior of their children, particularly when it comes to school-owned devices or homework online.
parents appreciate knowing not only the school’s Acceptable Use Policy, but also relish getting additional guidance about how they can extend that policy into their homes. With a carefully structured partnership between schools and homes, parents can help guide the process — and feel confident that they are doing the right thing.
Alignment between school and home with regards to digital citizenship and healthy digital usage is a hallmark of a 21st-century school. A community-wide understanding of the norms, rules of behavior, rules of engagement, and common practices is necessary for all schools in order to raise an ethical, digital (and real-life) citizen. Without this key parental partnership, these conversations regarding digital citizenship will just become incoherent whispers in the minds of our students, overwhelmed by the louder voices of media, false information, and misunderstanding.
Creating an Effective Digital Citizenship Program
Once school leaders commit to the idea that it is the school’s responsibility to guide students in the digital world beyond simple computer use, computer class, or a one-shot assembly on the dangers of being online, the school needs to create and implement an integrated program.
Phase 1: Crafting a Vision
Phase 2: Training Teachers, Engaging Parents
Once the groundwork is done, you need to build awareness of the program and expertise within it.
It is misguided to think that digital citizenship is a completely new and foreign curriculum that must be learned from scratch. At the core of digital citizenship are issues of awareness, kindness, and sound judgment, all of which we already teach. The key is to make the concrete connection between the kids’ digital and nondigital lives.
When training teachers, it is important to get all faculty on the same page. In our experience, the following steps will help:
- Familiarize teachers with the initiative. Hold a faculty meeting about the digital citizenship initiative, and discuss the background and classroom resources they have available to them. Discuss the importance of a spiraling approach — building an understanding in students about their digital lives from year to year.
- Make sure you schedule other times during the year for teachers to evaluate and integrate digital citizenship work. Think about fun ways for teachers to share ideas about digital citizenship in their classrooms.
- Make sure digital citizenship education is embedded across the curriculum at each grade level. Have a few target areas to address during the year, and encourage teachers to introduce digital citizenship concepts — copyright or privacy issues, for example — within a lesson when appropriate.
- Build in an end-of-year orientation, introducing faculty to the resources from Common Sense Media and elsewhere. This will provide time for them to integrate a few digital citizenship concepts into their curriculum as they plan over the summer.
Finding Your POISE
An important detail in our parent education at Hillbrook School has been to introduce a tactical strategy for parents to follow when their children are engaging in poor digital citizenship. It’s a process we call POISE. When your child makes a mistake:
- Pause: take a moment and remember to breathe... children make mistakes.
- Open-minded: keep a dialogue going; try to see all sides of the issue.
- Information collection: take time to collect all relevant information before reacting.
- Seek that teachable moment: use the school’s expertise to problem solve.
- Empower kids through education: they can’t become responsible without having responsibility.
Parents also need to understand the school’s digital citizenship goals, lessons, and expectations. Ultimately, you want parents to know the school’s acceptable use policy and expectations, and then encourage them to build their own parent–child media agreement about digital/online usage, behavior, and expectations at home. The goal is a unified front from the school and the home.
In reaching out to and forming an alliance with parents, consider the following:
- Start with written communications, but then provide education sessions at school where you can have a face-to-face conversation about digital citizenship issues at school and home. The goal is to create a communication framework. Make sure they have a way to ask questions about media use as they arise throughout the year. Remember this is not a one-shot approach but a regular exchange.
- Provide resources. In particular, direct parents toward Common Sense Media’s family media education resources.3
- Designate an online repository (website, iTunesU course, etc.) for the ongoing sharing of materials and information. Provide suggestions to parents about different home management strategies. Make sure parents have easy access to the Acceptable Use Policy.
- Encourage teachers to communicate with parents about digital citizenship topics or issues they may have addressed with students. Determine the best way for teachers to share this information on a regular basis.
Phase 3: Implementation
To kick off the year, we suggest comprehensive “boot camps” in which teachers practice their often newfound knowledge by leading workshops for the incoming students.
If it is difficult to have full-day or partial-day boot camps before the school year starts, dedicate class time in the beginning of the school year to key issues for specific age groups. Make sure every subject is giving some time to the activity; every teacher needs to be invested. When using digital resources or devices for work in class or at home, recap the specific digital citizenship components that they need to think about.
Throughout the year, build in a couple of check-in sessions with each grade level. The goal is to carve space regularly for open dialogue about concerns, issues, discoveries, and lessons learned. You want to provide an open forum for students to share their actual experiences. Many schools have advisory periods, human development classes, or other organized time during the year that would be appropriate for these discussions. Whatever works best for your school is fine. Just be sure to find the time.
A forward-looking library will include multifunctional spaces that facilitate studying, researching, meeting, creating, collaborating, and sharing of final student projects. The library continues to evolve with the needs of teacher and student researchers, making flexibility of space key. It should offer a physical and virtual access point to all formats of information, whether through the existing collection of print books or the growing collection of ebooks and other digital resources, including online subscription databases and the Internet itself. Even the most traditional library is a Makerspace — a place in which students compile and assimilate information into new knowledge. It also comes with experts — librarians — to assist students and faculty with their activities.
The forward-looking library may seem different from the hushed center of scholarship we remember, but it remains a library in all the traditional definitions: a collection of resources organized for easy access by interested researchers.
A school might support a traditional library model or move to incorporate elements of either a Learning Commons or a Makerspace model or both. “Learning Commons” is a term that refers to a mixed-use space for research, study, collaboration, global connection, and more — with librarians embodying the all-important connection between resources and students. The term “Makerspace” refers to an area of a library focused on production — offering, for example, digital cameras, a 3D printer, and photo manipulation and layout software. The Makerspace idea reinforces the library’s role in the entire learning spectrum from recreational reading to research to production and sharing.
A school library can be successful using aspects of either or both of these models, or the school’s own interpretation of these models. Strong and successful school libraries require broad collections of resources in many formats and enthusiastic, trained librarians to support students in using and applying information resources to build new knowledge.
The common question about going “print or digital” with library content naïvely glosses over multiple variables that significantly impact the resource availability to library patrons. There is often an assumption that digital content is less expensive than print, but that is a false assumption. Digital content can be substantially more expensive depending on content availability, methods of access, accessibility to mobile users, and the prevalence, availability, types, and cost of mobile devices. Decisions about content must take into account issues of access that are directly affected by campus infrastructure and technology standards, budget, and student use and demand patterns.
School libraries will continue to need teaching spaces that support the increasing Makerspace activities. Librarians remain the best trained to teach information and research skills. The library is, at its core, a classroom that promotes independent learning, but even the most independent learners benefit from expert guidance as they seek new resources. The actual space needed will remain substantial.
The Librarian’s Role in a Multiformat School Library
When a student discovers the perfect resource to answer a question or need — whether it is a database article, a book published in the 1880s, or a website — there is usually a librarian who facilitated that discovery, marking the path from the student search term to the discovered source. They help students to ask good questions of all resources, and to apply the answers to their continued research efforts. But finding quality authoritative information online is not the whole of the library-technology related curriculum. Many school librarians also teach digital ethics, copyright laws, and creative problem solving. They help facilitate the increasingly important global connection between students and the rest of the world, helping students connect to an authentic audience in a broader community, arranging Skype sessions with authors or experts in other locations, and culling resources as needed from varied sources and experts outside the school walls. Many librarians are on the leading edge of social media use, modeling cyber-wisdom through library blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts and recommending new tools for specific curricular projects.
Technology and the Library:
What’s Hot, and What’s Not?
| What's hot | What's not |
|---|
| Physical and virtual libraries as hubs of creating new knowledge and educational innovation. | libraries as stand-alone centers of knowledge consumption. |
| regular collaboration with the technology team to ensure consistency in skills, approach to technology, and technology policies. | librarians teaching technology in a vacuum, or ignoring the technology curriculum, while staying out of the conversation about technology policy or plans for the school. |
| Staffing that allows librarians to visit classrooms, to teach and accompany students on the research experience where it is happening, and to attend faculty meetings and department meetings across the curriculum. | Understaffing the library so the teaching librarian has to supervise the library and miss authentic research and collaboration moments. |
| Keeping a curated selection of books and digital resources that are used, and weeding and updating the collection on a regular basis. | Keeping an archive of books and resources that are rarely used. |
| encouraging the librarian to experiment and play with new digital resources and tools. | no opportunities to offer ebooks and new media to students and faculty due to budget constraints. |
| offering collaborative workspaces for students and noise-cancelling headphones for those who want silence. | Shushing students all day. |
| lending gear from laptops to iPads, from phone chargers to video cameras, from rulers to calculators. | advocating in-library use only for many materials. |
| librarians active in their personal learning networks in order to stay aware of the rapidly changing field and to help lead the discussions about new and meaningful avenues for technology in the curriculum. | librarians not willing (or not given the opportunity) to implement change in the library program or services offered. |
| collaborating with teachers to create inquiry-based projects that seamlessly integrate research and information literacy skills into the academic curriculum. | leaving the librarian out of the planning process and implementation in regard to research and technology resources. |
| learning how to search google effectively. | one million hits in your google results list. |
| a library space with powerful Wi-Fi, numerous outlets, whiteboards, moveable furniture, and easy access to the virtual library. | inflexible learning spaces. |
| a welcoming, student-centered library that supports learning and curiosity. | a library where students feel there are too many rules with no purpose. |
A three-dimensional (3D) classroom integrates one, some, or all of the following suggested elements: self-reflection, peer instruction, content creation, ideation (the process of forming ideas or images), interdisciplinary learning, and collaboration. In a 3D classroom, students actively participate in formative assignments, deciding what has value and meaning in that particular learning experience. Although students receive direct instruction from the teacher, the relationship between teacher and student differs from a 2D classroom in that the teacher is not the sole source of knowledge and judgment. In fact, 3D teachers commonly acknowledge that they do not know the answers nor do they have prescribed routes for finding those answers. They encourage student-generated lines of inquiry — creating an opportunity for students to acquire and apply knowledge — in order to connect the classroom experience with the life of the students in real time. They encourage (and possess) what Stanford Professor Carol Dweck terms a growth mindset.
On a curricular level, educators can visualize the third dimension as an additional variable in an equation. This variable can mutate from grade level to grade level, discipline to discipline, and perhaps most important, unit to unit. Each classroom curricular unit can guide what this third dimensional variable could be for the most powerful student learning experiences.
Collaboration
Collaboration implies an active and equal connection with people other than the classroom teacher. These people could be classmates, students from other grade levels or schools, professionals in the field, or contacts anywhere beyond the school walls. Over the course of the school year, a variety of collaborative experiences within academic units broadens students’ ideas about what learning can be and resonates with their individual lives.
Creativity
Three-dimensional teaching endorses the kind of ideation or original thinking that engages learning on a deeper level and may remain with the student for the long term. The notions of creativity have expanded in recent years to move beyond the realm of artistic expression and creative writing to include, among other things, formulating ideas and engaging in problem solving and alternative forms of communication. As opposed to teacher-directed projects, ideation implies individuated student questions fueled by critical thinking and resulting in original content creation. This content creation might be an essay, a dialogue, artwork, an experiment, or developing alternative solutions to many types of problems. Content creation develops the affective behavioral skills of fluency, flexibility, resilience, and perseverance, all of which are crucial to lifelong learning.
Adding creativity to the traditional classroom dynamic stresses a different type of skill from that of collaboration. Creativity showcases originality and individuality and fosters the development of a personal-learning paradigm and network. Idea creation guides a student through her personal lines of inquiry and methods of inquiring.
Interdisciplinary
Interdisciplinary studies encourage students to, in writer Jonah Lehrer’s phrase, “trespass on the standard boundaries of thought.” One way to trespass on these boundaries within a given discipline is to consider the reasoning or processes of another discipline. The “trespass” creates an element of surprise, and the juxtaposition allows students to transcend conventional thinking within a discipline. Unconventional or original thinking arises from these remote associations, which can lead to innovation.
Beyond “Fluff or Fun”
What happens to learning when the traditional instructional paradigm adds another dimension? The third dimension brings education to life through the domains that are in demand outside the school walls: creativity, collaboration, and thinking across boundaries. Nonetheless, several challenges exist in making the 3D classroom a successful experience. The paradigm shift from the 2D to the 3D teaching and learning must be more than “fluff and fun.” Its seriousness must be recognized and valued by students, administrators, and parents. Some teachers may feel uncomfortable with colleagues or members of the community having an influential voice in their classroom. In schools with top-down leadership, some teachers may be held hostage by standardized testing and preset objectives. And, as with any cultural shift in a school community, there will be those who resist and those who need support and guidance.
