Some take-away messages from Peter Pasque's presentation:
Full Tech Integration Helps Students Learn from Others and Market Themselves
Google Drive is a truly collaborative platform. This, along with its preservation of documents in the cloud, is its chief positive attribute. It turns out that our teachers weren't lying when they told us that knowing how to plan and execute projects with other people would be valuable for our post-secondary and post-college lives. We are responsible for teaching our students how to work well with others, both for their own sake (that is, the intrinsic value of becoming better, more learned people by speaking and listening with others) and for the sake of the society they are beginning to take full part in. Google Drive allows students the ability to create team-built documents in real time; it also allows students the ability to gain direct, written feedback from their peers via commenting interfaces. Tech integration, if used effectively, has the capacity to help students become better people and improve their community through collaboration with others.
Full tech integration can also help students market themselves to future employers or colleges. I don't naturally like the term ("market") because it reduces a living, breathing person to a commodity; it's the same reason why I'm instantly repelled by the phrase "human resources". But the reality is that there are folks who have the power to make agreements by which we exert work for the monetary compensation required for food, shelter, and fun. These folks want to see proof that their investments will pay off, and students' digital portfolios can function as such proof. A strong digital portfolio can give a potential employer valuable information about a person's work ethic and specific skills far more accurately than a resume can. And in this way, digital portfolios can level the playing field for students whose personal circumstances may not provide as much by way of special training in resume creation, standardized test-taking, or college application coaching. In a truly meritocratic society, we must move toward evaluation based on what a person has done and not on what a test estimates they might do. And grades, like any other measurement, provide only partial information. Direct observation of subject mastery is (or should be) the future of evaluation for purposes of employment or post-secondary admission.
Full Tech Integration Helps Teachers Know Their Students
Among other points, I feel that there are two here that really hit home.
Firstly, I believe that digital portfolios of student work, if they are created every school year from an early age, can give teachers extremely useful information about the students they teach. Over our brief break in August, I traveled back to New Hampshire to see my family and relax as much as possible. While there, I happened across a box of old papers, projects, and pictures that my parents had kept from my middle school years. Given that we teaching interns had just worked with students of the same age group, I had an incredibly fascinating perspective toward my seventh-grade self. I was in the middle of reading my response to the question "If there was one thing you would change about school, what would it be?" (my answer: "I think school is a little too much like the military ...") when I thought how illuminating it would be for teachers to be able to view a student's complete history of academic progress and demonstration of subject mastery. With a better understanding of our students' skills and interests, teachers can plan lessons and curricula to really fit with their classes before the school year ever begins. Knowing our students' skills and passions is crucial to good, student-centered teaching; having some of these understandings well in advance of the school year equates to hours of gained instructional time and more strategic lessons.
Secondly, in the same way that Google Drive is a collaborative platform for students, it is collaborative for teachers. Departments can better coordinate curriculum planning and text selection. Teachers can share responsibilities of lesson creation and planning with other teachers who will edit, refine, and provide feedback. I don't think it's a far-fetched claim that teachers should be building portfolios of lesson plans, course materials, and artifacts in the same way that students do; such portfolios could increase accountability in a far better way than relying on students' test scores, and such portfolios would allow department heads and administrators to give more valuable feedback to teachers (and beginning teachers, especially).
Another awesome facet of full tech integration that I think deserves mention is that it is far more environmentally friendly than traditional systems. Whenever I say something is a plus for the planet, I feel like I need to qualify the statement with a firm attestation that I'm not an eco-nut, tree-hugger (though I do love the texture of bark on skin), or hippie -- but the truth is (i.e., much research indicates) that our society's incredibly massive dependence on fossil fuels and other natural resources (the trees!) has led us into the requirement that we cut back severely. It is an inexorable truth that oil will run out (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil) and that trees cannot keep up with our demand for paper. How many ten-page papers have we passed in so that a teacher can throw them into the ground or, at best, into a consumptive process of re-use that has diminishing returns? Requiring that students create and submit information in a way that uses only time and marginal amounts of electricity is one small step on the path to creating sustainable schools and citizens mindful of sustainable practices.
The power is YOURS.
The biggest problem I keep running up against is that full tech integration is problematic for student populations for whom internet access at home isn't a certainty. This is yet another area in which those who don't have equal resources are at a disadvantage. For one-to-one schools, whole-school tech integration is a no-brainer, but until every school is one-to-one (and I wish this were a reality), I can't feel 100% comfortable with full tech integration. This isn't to say that I wouldn't institute it and plan carefully with students who don't have internet access at home; most students do have internet access at home, and we owe it to them to teach them how to create, organize, and maintain their digital work. The good news here, I think, is that we are quickly approaching an age when one-to-one schools will become the norm rather than the minority because of falling equipment prices. We can serve our students best by anticipating this and, like Peter Pasque's school has done, pilot effective programs for the purpose of improving future students' learning.
