During our professional development time at Spearfish High School yesterday, we discussed Susan Kruger's SOAR study skills program, which Spearfish HS will implement next school year. One of the key components of SOAR is a big binder in which students organize their papers.
Paper. I haven't handed out a single paper to my French students all year.
As I Googled SOAR, I found a link from Kruger to Colorado teacher-turned-tech coordinator Karl Fisch's blog. He poses this question to school folks sitting through their final professional development sessions before exams and planning for next year:
I was talking about the changes in how we access information, from books to text-based search to voice recognition search to image/location based search to Wolfram Alpha search, etc. And then I said something along the lines of:
Are you ready for all your students to enter your classroom wearing Google Glass?
There are lots of layers to that question, most of which I wasn't thinking of when I said it, but I think it's worth asking yourself - and your colleagues - some variation of that question. Are you ready for Google Glass-nost, the increased openness and transparency of a connected world? When you are endlessly debating CCSS, or your curriculum, or whether to go with a paper-based planner for your students, are you really thinking about a Glass-enabled world? Are you ready for your students to have a heads-up display with instant access to all the world's knowledge - and the ability to instantly connect with most of the world's people? [emphasis mine; Karl Fisch, "Are You Ready for Glass-Nost?" The Fisch Bowl, 2013.04.17]
Kruger has only recently decided that smart phones are sufficiently flexible and accessible to support the binder-planner method she teaches.
The tools we use to teach kids to plan and study are not as important as the planning and studying skills themselves. Fisch himself said (originally in this 2006 presentation), "We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet." Orienting curriculum around any specific product, whether Google's fancy e-monocle or a bulging Trapper Keeper, ignores the heart of the learning students must do to prepare for the unpredictable future.
But consider the heart of Fisch's bigger quote: if our tools are moving toward omniscience and omni-connectance, shouldn't we teach students to plan and study with the assumption that they can access and make accessible to anyone else any information at any time?
For every smartphone ap she pays someone to develop, a free one will spring up within in months; for every OneNote, there's an EverNote and for every Microsoft Office, there's OpenOffice.
I've tried hard to get my students to do things digitally instead of printing paper. For example, the reviews I use Word to create all have text boxes so they should be able to save and work with them digitally, but fewer than half do.I still do tests on paper, but I may spend some of the summer trying to find a way to get away from that.
On to the last part, " shouldn't we teach students to plan and study with the assumption that they can access and make accessible to anyone else any information at any time?" I'll answer with a qualified yes; they need to know how to do something with the knowledge. Also, it bugs the heck out of me when I have a 50 point assignment and students reach for a calculator to determine that 47 points out of 50 is 94%. They know how to access, but they waste time doing it,
Good points, Kal Lis! The kids have these tools, but many of them don't know how to really put them to work for efficient studying.
Tests on paper: that's the only handout I make. Those papers, filled out with every device but pencils and pens off the desk, still strike me as the most secure testing technology for determining whether students really put this French in their heads.
Cory, I did see an application (forgive me the name escapes me.) The teacher would develop a ‘pool’ of about 100 questions with multiple choice answers. The test is then sent to the students via Bluetooth by the teacher it comprises of 50 questions from the pool in random order with the answers in random order. Once time expires the exam is turned off, and the exams are graded the student and teacher know the grade instantly, upon approval from the student & teacher it is added into the grade book.
No two tests are alike. The program is full screen and locks out other applications. While it is hardly foolproof, it might be something looking at
very interesting. Thanks Cory for sharing
Pretty cool app, MC... but does that app prevent students from accessing their browser or notes during the test to get answers?
Happy to share, Old Guy. This is the stuff I think about at work every day.