Thinky? Sticky? The Thinking Stick

Not to be confused with The Thicking Stink, Jeff Utecht's The Thinking Stick (http://www.thethinkingstick.com/) offers terrifically relevant insight into what roles technology should play in our classrooms. The blog does so through balanced evaluations of web tools, life-based demonstrations of how students have incorporated technology into their acts of learning, and philosophical wax-ations on how we, as teachers, can balance and strengthen our craft within the one climate that Utecht identifies as a constant: that of change.

I think I used to own this same shirt. The wonders of vertical stripes -- amirite?

I find Utecht's blog valuable because ...

It asks questions. Not just rhetorical ones or afterthoughts, and not just the type that artificially serve as a starting point for some discussion that may never happen. These are big questions that we should keep in mind constantly when we think about what our teaching is and how to improve it. Utecht blew the lid off early in the game, back in January of 2008, when he penned "Evaluating Technology Use in the Classroom" (http://www.thethinkingstick.com/evaluating-technology-use-in-the-classroom/). He adapted Marc Prensky's typical course of technology adoption to form four core questions that we should think about as we integrate tech into our curricula:

• Is the technology being used “Just because it’s there”?
• Is the technology allowing the teacher/students to do Old things in Old ways?
• Is the technology allowing the teacher/students to do Old things in New ways?
• Is the technology creating new and different learning experiences for the students?

In our evaluation of tech use in relation to the fourth question, he asks:

• Does the technology allow students to learn from people they never would have been able to without it?
• Does the technology allow students to interact with information in a way that is meaningful and could not have happened otherwise?
• Does the technology allow students to create and share their knowledge with an audience they never would have had access to without technology?

Talk about being ahead of the pack. These questions have as much relevance today as they did five years ago, and I think even this in itself says something that educators should take note of: as teachers, we should create lasting, relevant questions that will be able to shape our students' Big Capital-T Thoughts for a long time to come. Even if the answers change (and they definitely will!), the questions should remain evocative and relevant.

It's Clean and Quick. Just like a solid car wash or a good children's song. Utecht writes concisely and thoughtfully, and he does so in a way that's respectful of web readers' eyes and attention spans. His post "10 Reasons to Trash Word for Google Docs" (http://www.thethinkingstick.com/10-reasons-to-trash-word-for-google-docs/) provides 10 excellent reasons for adopting the cloud-based word-processing suite. Each is well reasoned and doesn't exceed four lines. The content's good, too -- he evaluates Gdocs based on accessibility, user-friendliness, looking-forwardness, and functionality. And he's down with the Cloud. Color me convinced.

He Keeps His Students' Interests in Mind. Utecht understands that life exists beyond high school, and he seems to believe that we should give our students what they need to succeed and enjoy it. His recent post "Millennials and the Job Market" (http://www.thethinkingstick.com/millennials-and-the-job-market/) calls for more explicit training in online portfolio-building so that students will have the knowledge and the electronic track record to qualify for jobs that simply didn't exist ten years ago (he provides the examples of social media producer, social media specialist, and digital marketing intern). We need to keep our kids' futures in mind and devote instructional time to the incorporation of skills and projects that will directly contribute to our students' fit to the types of jobs that are being created.

He Thinks About the Future Through the Past. Utecht compares the role of programmer (coder) to that of the medieval scribe in "Are Coders the Scribes of our Time?" (http://www.thethinkingstick.com/are-coders-the-scribes-of-our-time/). By doing so, he comes to a fantastic question: Just like almost everyone can now practice a skill (writing) that, long ago, very few people were able to practice, will almost everyone someday be able to code? Will coding ability someday be considered rudimentary literacy? This strikes me as an amazing question and as one that has truth to it. So much can change in a century, and as people who will be uniquely qualified to prepare young people for lives that will span decades of change, we must look to the past to see how things have changed over similar time frames so that we can anticipate what skills will have value in the future. Let's aim not for where the target is, but where it will be. We owe our students nothing less.