Broadband: Changing the Face of Education

This post is a guest spot from Broadband for America's Kate Drazner. Visit their website to find out more about their initiative to make broadband access to the internet available to every household in the nation; to provide data transfer speeds to make that broadband experience valuable to users; and to provide the bandwidth necessary for content providers to continue to make the internet a cultural, societal, and economic engine for growth.

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In today's changing educational environment, children will need access to high-speed Internet in order to get a complete schooling experience that is on par with their fellow classmates across the country. To that end, Broadband for America's goal is to bring high-speed Internet access to every home, business and individual across the nation.

Statistics show that students, especially those in the minority and rural communities, have alarmingly high dropout rates in high-school when those students do not have access to a computer or broadband.

Conversely, those same students who do have access are amongst the nation's top academic performers.

While publishers of educational material in the United States like Prestwick House have long excelled in providing more traditional offerings of paperback books, teaching guides and vocabulary programs, they have also seen firsthand the increasing benefits to education through technology. Implementing the benefits of broadband will take those resources to the next level.

The options for students of all ages are nearly limitless: streaming educational videos, online textbooks, conferencing with guest instructors, online tutoring, or even viewing priceless artwork over the web.

Prestwick House is already a part of the broadband educational revolution, offering "PowerPresentations," which run on PowerPoint and SMARTBoard. With their goal of aiding teachers of all levels of English and Language Arts, they have also taken on the initiative of providing teaching resources that work well in a 21st century classroom and have extended their reach through social networking and blogging.

However, putting those tools to work requires not only access to high-speed Internet, but adoption by nearly half of all Americans who rely on slower connections or cannot access the Internet at all. The challenge of today, and tomorrow, is ensuring that all students have access to the same educational tools, including high-speed Internet, which will allow them to succeed in the academic sector and to later compete in the global economy.

Step Outside of the Classroom

Most literature-o-philes and educators would name Dead Poets Society as one of their top movie picks. What did Robin Williams do that was so brilliant?


He had his students step out of the classroom for their learning.

Although, this movie was made in the 1990s, many students rarely step outside of their classrooms—with the exception of going on field trips. However, with budget cuts, field trips are usually one of the first expenses eliminated. This is a tragedy when you consider students that spend a good portion of their lives in school.

Why is a change in environment a brilliant idea?

When students figure out that they can learn from a portrait in a school's hallway, then the teacher has given them the gift of knowing that people can learn anywhere! The teacher has sparked their curiosity so that the students see the objects around them as having learning potential. In this way, the teacher has just helped the student carry the learning beyond the walls of the classroom and potentially outside the walls of the school. Just a simple act has created students who learn continuously in any kind of setting.

Moreover, students and teachers both need fresh air or a change in scenery to boost their creative juices. Often student behavior can be managed by having students get out of their desks and physically move. Moving outside the classroom for educational purposes may also appeal to different learning styles. Students will have the ability to use their other senses to learn.

Some lesson ideas include...

• Round robin discussions — Students sit in small groups on the ground or on picnic benches and discuss a topic; one student keeps a record of the discussion. The class will then come together, with each group reporting its findings.


• Make videos—One of my high school student's favorite lessons was recreating television commercials. First, each student group chose a commercial and analyzed the stereotypes or misconceptions in the commercial. Then the students tried to recreate the same commercial without the stereotypes or misconceptions.


• Go on a scavenger hunt — Students can look for objects of a certain color, texture, and so forth. If you want to add a digital aspect, have them record certain sounds, and then have other students hunt for these sounds. Have the students take close-up pictures of objects and have others hunt for the object.


• Do a field study — I've had elementary students hunt for fossils with a paleontologist, collect and analyze weather data with a meteorologist, and explore the microbes in a nearby river with a water engineer. A majority of these activities required only a phone call, and we even walked to some of the events. In Germany, school groups walk to several places or take public transportation, which lowers the cost to make more field trips possible.


• Journal — Students can simply listen to the sounds around them and describe the experience in a journal, or each one can pick a place to sit and compose a poem, create a comic, or draw.
  

When you step outside your classroom your students will....

• Get more physical activity, which promotes physical and mental well-being
• Look forward to your classes
• Learn to think outside the box, which will definitely help them in their future careers
• Continue with these ideas outside of school and choose outside activities instead of staying inside and watching television.

What are some interesting ways you have taught “outside your classroom”?


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Special thanks to guest blogger, Shelly Terrell, for her contribution to the Prestwick Cafe Blog.

Shelly Sanchez Terrell is a technology teacher trainer, English language teacher, and consultant for various language institutes, online schools, and educational institutes in Nepal, the US, Germany, and Italy. Explore her Teacher Reboot Camp Blog for tips on professional development and integrating technology effectively into the classroom. She can be reached via Twitter, @shellterrell.

Global Competence and Literacy

As our world becomes smaller and we grow closer together every day, the importance of understanding and having an appreciation of our neighbors is becoming the greatest skill we can offer our students.

It is more than simple tolerance — it is critical that we educate and connect our students using powerful practices, so that they can obtain the ability to be self-motivated and adapt and respect each other. The value of this knowledge to a child’s growth is immense. We have the ability to make authentic change and begin to systematically tear down the digital divide that keeps growing. We can use video conferencing, social networks, global media outlets, and countless other connected resources to reach this goal.

Our students can build a tool kit of relevant skills that will ready them for lives and careers without boundaries, where problem solving, communicating, and knowing how to find the answer are even more important than the content of the traditional classes that they are taking in our high schools at present.

Of course, there are opponents to this globally connected growth, and they do have relevant points to make. There are real concerns and questions in moving public education towards a mobilized, global curriculum: When will we have time? How will this impact testing?

What if the students know more about the technology than we do? All of a sudden, we back down from dreams of the globally connected classroom, but the evidence of success is too strong to let the traditional constructs and fears in education hold us back. We don’t have the luxury of choice anymore; global education is our responsibility and a service we must provide if our students are to compete in a global society.

Where does literacy fit in? Clearly, the impact on digital literacy is evident, but traditional literacy may be a bit more disguised when trying to find it in “the bag” of global education learning outcomes. So, how did I find it? Well, I didn’t go looking for it; I just felt obligated to bring a connected classroom with a multicultural perspective to my students.

I started inviting students to participate in social networks, guided them to use tools for video communication, and promoted the value of creative thinking and choice in a globally focused manner. In time, I began to see some very captivating and energizing byproducts. It started with a few students connecting to a community that partnered English speakers with Japanese speakers in order to teach each other the “foreign” language.

During class, I would see kids on Google Translate or using grammar sites to get the perfect communication with their Japanese partners. Several times, I have had students come to me and ask if they could meet with their English teacher to review a blog post before publishing. I even had a student ask me how he could build his own blogging site with a spell checker! If you haven’t seen the terrain of a modern American high school lately, I can tell you that finding students who are intrinsically inspired to make revisions to better their work is quite rare.

Furthermore, motivating children to develop inherent value and take ownership of their school projects is nirvana for any educator.

Consequently, I have decided not to worry about the tests, or if I have enough time in the day, or any other fear that might creep into my paranoid teaching mind. Of course, I will be faced with those fears again, but not with any fears about global education. Students’ actions are confirmation enough for me to subscribe to this new world, and their success is testimony that traditional literacy can be nurtured in a digital literacy curricular area.

I also am confident that any good teacher will say the same thing – when you find the delicate convergence of instructional strategies that inspire, you embrace it and don’t change a thing!

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Special Thanks to Guest Blogger, Rich Kiker, for his contribution to the Prestwick Café Blog.

Rich Kiker is the department chair for the Media Technology Academy at Palisades High School in Kintnersville, PA. His work in PA includes being a Keystone Technology Integrator, a Classrooms for the Future Technology Coach, and a PA professional development instructor. His latest ventures include bringing virtual classrooms and global competence to the students at Palisades.

Building Something New: There’s Always Demolition Required

I can hear them now, the collective groans and complaints of our staff as they walk zombie-like down the hall in the direction of the office with one motive: braaaains!

Teaching is a difficult job; it’s no surprise that we have a lot to complain about in any given day. Administrators have no shortage of rotten opinions spoiling in their inboxes. The staff lunchroom reeks at times of foul language, maybe not unsuitable for television, but certainly unpleasant and cringe-worthy. When teachers lose control of things they feel responsible for, it’s easy to become bent out of shape. We want our kids to learn, we want our principals to listen, and we want our school boards to argue in our favor.

When we feel cut-off from our community, ignored, shut-down, and unimportant, we all revert to communicating through our innate language of complaint. This is an unavoidable part of the adult world because there are always things to complain about. How negativity is dealt with in your school is one of the most important factors to consider when looking at the broader picture. If you want useful data on your school’s stability, don’t snip a few petals off from the prettiest branch— take a core sample.

Whom do your teachers complain to? What stays behind closed doors, and what really gets reported? Do people generally shy away from speaking out, in favor of generating gossip? Is there a system in place that people feel welcome to participate in? What happens if departments disagree on vital educational tenets? To whom do teachers go when they feel the administration is ignoring them? When should you worry about going over someone’s head or about cutting in?

Most of us simply want what’s best for our school and do not want to make our neighbors angry or flood our principals with needless work. The hard part is going about finding what you want while also not damaging your relationship with others around you at the same time. It’s like demolishing a building in a crowded city block. If you’re a city employee who wants the old abandoned warehouse replaced by a shiny new apartment building, you’ll have to do two things: remove the old one and then put in the new. Making changes in schools is fairly similar: people need to be led away from the old ways and convinced the new is better.

No matter how “right” you are about change needing to take place, you’ve got to be careful and deliberate about communicating your ideas. No matter how much dynamite the construction crew has available to destroy the current structure, they have to take very strict precautions before depressing that plunger. Otherwise, the grocery store a block away, the day care center across the street, and the bank next-door are put in considerable danger. Simply letting loose the explosions would certainly make a mess of what’s there and the casualties would be so costly, you’d never be able to afford the new building.

If dissent is not welcome and encouraged in a safe and constructive fashion, then any potential improvements will suffer. Is there something worth changing in your school? If so, then it’s probably worth complaining about to someone. Just consider how and where you place your charges. You may destroy more than you hoped to build.


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Special Thanks to Guest Blogger, Steve J. Moore for his contribution to the Prestwick Café Blog.


Steve J. Moore heads his high school's reading department and teaches literacy skills to incoming freshman. His blog www.mooreonthepage.com is an account of his first year as a teacher, and is being published in a series through the Missouri State Teachers Association's publication Teacher U. Full of energy, optimism, and frankness, Moore's posts mean to uplift and encourage anyone with a stake in education.