Tech Analysis

At Santa Barbara Junior High, students have access to computers in the library and the computer lab. However, the computer lab is only accessible through teacher sign-ups, and the library operates on a similar policy. The librarians generally let students walk in with a pass if there are extra computers to use, but mostly the on campus computer access is strangely limited. Considering the Common Core's requirement to implement technology into any curriculum, how are students going to keep up with requirements if teachers are limited in how much time they can lead students with any particular lesson?

Many students are tech savvy, but even the higher-level tech users have trouble following through with assignments. EDU, for example, is incredibly useful for quick assessment quizzes and mini essays during a class unit, but it's only useful so long as the students actually go home and use it. To check for accessibility outside of school, or even at a public library, I queried my content class with a simple Google quiz. The irony of creating a Google Form quiz was I had to print it out and administer it as a hard copy, then input the collected data myself.

I knew if I gave the students the link to take the quiz at home I would have had answers from maybe 10 kids, or about 30 percent of the class. This would have been misleading, however, since the hardcopy results told me that all 29 students have Internet access at home. So why the disparity?

I initially got 25 students to respond to my quiz, even though it was a hardcopy
and due during the same class period. A few stragglers handed the form in during
the next day, but they hadn't answered all the questions.

Several of the kids are on the verge of failing. Many of them go to afterschool homework clubs, thus when they get home they don’t want to sit down at the computer and do more homework. Even the kids who were working above average and had all the classwork done and were mentoring their fellow students had still failed to share a Google Doc with me after a week of prodding them during and after every class. Most of the lack of shared docs was to save face.

A few girls over the last day or two admitted they didn’t know how to share a document. This is strangely disheartening, since I had shown them on the big screen two days in a row how to share a doc. Yet even after multiple examples, they still didn’t know how. This is probably due to not having a screen in front of them to actually do the process while I showed them, so that once they got home they forgot the steps. Finally a handful of boys and girls came up and begged me to show them again, and I used the two iMacs in the class to walk them through the process near the end of class.

Even though most students still hadn't done something as

simple as share a Google Doc with me, they answered that 

they would prefer to answer on EDU.

This made me quite proud, because after only two weeks of my takeover, they felt comfortable enough to admit that they really didn’t know how to share the doc, even though they had said yes. Yes means no. This was even more telling because a majority of the students would prefer to do an assignment digitally if given the option. The problem with this scenario refers back to my intro, in that there are computers, but there is no computer class. Students have access to tech at home, but for a good portion of them, no one is showing them how to actually function on the computer.

Several teachers informed me that the previous superintendent of schools wasn’t into technology, and  therefore not only was there an insufficient amount of computers, there wasn’t anybody teaching the kids how to use the things. Now we have the push to assess our students with technology through technology, and many of the students know what they want to accomplish, but don’t have the technological dexterity to accomplish those goals.

This is a matter of students playing semantics. The form was answered via a hardcopy, 

so how else would they have gained access to it? I filled that in, but the other answers 

the students had filled in, either indicating a sense of humor or a sense of confusion.

It’s really frustrating to see a lab full of beautiful iMacs, but have to book it three months in advance to get it for one day, then get in there and have a 50/50 chance of the Internet going down and wasting 45 minutes of the student’s time. In addition to the nearly clichéd faultiness is the aforementioned lack of dexterity on a computer. Nearly every student in school is tech savvy, whether their ability be on a smart phone, a game console or a computer at home. Their lack of sharing something as simple as a Google Doc is not an attempt to rebel against the teacher, the school, or their grades; it’s a lack of training.

I hope with the Common Core moving into the curriculum, with its emphasis on technology, that districts, the state and local administration will find ways to reinvigorate student knowledge of computers and their many uses. Growing up we had computer and typing class: now, at SBJH anyway, they have neither. It’s not fair to the kids and it’s not fair to the teachers, both of whom are hamstringed by lofty rhetoric with no way to implement the ideas.

Reflection

I’ve always been a part of the tech #nerdfarm, and it’s only been a matter of finances that has kept me from keeping up with the proverbial Jones’s. So while I consider myself fairly informed of the new and cool, I am now also much more aware of the strange grey legality of educational data systems such as EDU.

When I discovered that EDU was less than a year old, and already the district is adopting Illuminate, all while still merged with Aeries, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of charlatan was playing the well-intentioned administrators against each other and selling program after program to an unsuspecting audience.

Recently, a few members of my PLC at Santa Barbara Junior High complained about an email the admin had sent out, which detailed students on their rosters who had missing assignments and therefore were on the verge of failing. This information had come from the admin sitting and pouring over the EDU data. Since my master’s question involved analyzing some EDU data, and after asking several of the tech specialists in the district how this can be facilitated, I know that analyzing that data is done manually. There is no magic button to sort female from male students, analytics of all seventh grade students with grades below a C-, or a simplified chart of missing assignments and what students haven’t turned in that work.

One discovery I made without even looking for the answer was that poor grades are directly correlated to missing work. If students get in all work, even if the general content is merely satisfactory, students will get at least a C (give or take). My point is that EDU has that information embedded, but it requires hours of manually sorting through this data to get answers. What concerns me is the admin desperately want this data, and this is why there are currently three data systems being bandied about in the system.

As we read about in class, the concern over privacy is a legitimate issue, as administrators, principals in particular, almost have carte blanche to allocate funds toward whatever functionality they feel will best serve their school. While systems like EDU are system wide and are therefore vetted by a much bigger braintrust than any one principal, just seeing the end results with individual schools it’s apparent that those in charge of buying data systems have no idea what it really does prior to signing the check.

That same article stated “school districts across the country are increasingly adopting digital technologies that collect details about students’ achievements, activities, absences, disabilities and learning styles in an effort to tailor instruction to the individual child. The hope is that personalized, data-driven education will ultimately improve students’ graduation rates and career prospects.” Personalized data, if gathered correctly, couldn’t possibly do anything but help teachers and admin—and parents—help kids become better learners and citizens. Data collecting is what good teachers have been doing for decades, centuries even, all without the aid of a good data system.

They have collected attendance, watched their behavior, analyzed their work, and interpreted that data to communicate better with any given child. Now it’s become easier to sort out the little details, and teachers can merge toward the role of uncertified psychologists to better serve the kids in their classroom. Yet the people providing these data systems and mandating their use are also unlicensed lawyers, signing contracts for giant data systems without reading the small print.

“New research on how school districts handle the transfer of student data to companies, for instance, has found that administrators have signed contracts without clauses to protect personal details like children’s contact information, age ranges or where they wait for school buses every morning. [italics are mine].”

Does this mean the admin are ignorant? No, they’re desperate, and constantly seeking quick fixes, all while the greasy charlatans make money coming and going. Clint Eastwood showed how it was done in A Fistful of Dollars. Maybe during the next district-wide meeting that movie should be mandatory viewing so the admin can learn from their mistakes.

My viewpoint on all of this technology was most subverted by the number of students who are incredibly efficient at typing their papers into Google Docs—some are quicker at thumbing their rough drafts onto tiny little screens than they are typing them onto a real computer. This is both the new generation adapting to what is most readily available to them, and a sad statement that the school system is well behind proper training of the next generation of youth.

Typing on a standard Qwerty keyboard is a dying art form, and yet it is one of the foundational skills stated in the school curriculum starting in fourth grade. By sixth grade students should have at a minimum a rudimentary ability to type 20 to 30 words a minute, using proper hand technique. Sadly, close to 100 percent of the current crop of students have no idea how to type on a traditional keyboard, and that percentage goes all the way to seniors in high school.

I’ve talked to parents who scoff at the ability to type—they don’t see it as a useful tool. Students adopt this mentality and prove their scorn through their deft use of smartphones to type in their documents. Given, with the rapid (rabid?) rise of tablets into the classroom, the keyboard is a relic, and most people are quicker at pecking or thumbing than they are at typing. If this is a trend, however disheartening, is it something educators should just resolve themselves to?

This simple argument for typing is a symptom of a bigger problem: a disconnect between the new and the old. If the current argument holds, there will be an entire generation of college students unable to type in the traditional sense, and they will be in the computer lab typing their term papers on their smart phones while checking their Facebook status on the screen next to them.

Thank you for the class. This was typed on a standard keyboard.