I see teachers using cell phones, online collaboration and Senteo Clickers with SmartBoards in ways that make my head spin.

And the gap between the students that have teachers who bring this stuff into their curriculum and the ones that do not leads me to ask the question, “Are we, perhaps, unwittingly creating a gulf of what can be considered “critical classroom learning” between our students simply through the way we grant (or deny) permission to use certain tools when we pass out our assignments?

Does a student who is asked to fashion a digital museum representative of the appropriateness of the N word in Huck Finn get more, the same, or less from the assignment than the student who is asked to write an 3 page essay on the same subject matter?

Does the student who is asked to write a 3 page persuasive essay on why marijuana should remain illegal take more, the same, or less from the assignment than the student who makes a short film based on the very same prompt?

Is it apples to oranges? Does one give more, one less? Are they equivalent?
Should students be free to choose the means of how they express their thinking as long as the thinking addresses the academic objective of the assignment?

Ask 10 teachers, get 11 answers.

Last week I mentioned about me being up on stage speaking to a large group of big kahunas from all over the state. Basically district officers and principals.

Now one of the unspoken rules of public speaking is that it’s a good idea not to fight with the audience members. Pander, don’t provoke.

Let’s just say that my behavior onstage sometimes proves that I didn’t get that memo.

It started with a high ranking woman taking a bit of umbrage with my stance that using cell phones in class, as woven into the fabric of a lesson plan, is a much more sensible approach than banning cell phones outright. Why? Because cell phones are here to stay and they virtually demand their own type of literacy and if we can leverage the students’ love of technology and build a bridge between using their cell phone and using their brain to achieve an academic objective, there is nothing wrong with doing so.

Matter of fact, I believe we ought to do more of it. Prohibiting cell phones on campus just strikes me as a battle we will never win. Especially since most teens have their parents buy them their cell phones in the first place which automatically gives cell phone approval that trumps my own disapproval (if I were to disapprove, of course.)

Anyway, that set the stage. She took umbrage with my cell phone stance. And why?

“Because,” as she said, “she can remember back in the 1980′s when kids were doing drug deals in class with their pagers.”

Okay, I won’t even go there. We all know that’s an argument I wouldn’t dare touch because it’s be like take out a bazooka against a person that barely held a poorly constructed bow and arrow.

But then she continued and said, “For example, I just left a session where the person next to me was texting the whole time. I mean they missed the whole session while fiddling with their cell phone. And it was a good session, too. They missed some valuable stuff.”

Now the fight is more fair here, right?

Let’s take a look at her presumption.

First of all, the txt-er could have been tweeting the whole session because they were riveted and really wanted to spread the awesome info to 1,268 of their followers.

Or perhaps, they were taking note on their phone.

Maybe they were live-blogging?

Her presumption that because the person was txting they were missing out on the info could have been preposterously wrong.

Then again, this presupposes the inverse is true – that just because someone is looking at you, they are actually listening to what you are saying.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had my eyes lasered in on some kind of lame consultant as they fumble through a Power Point with an expression that beamed, “I am riveted by your genius!” while inside my brain, I was thinking, “I wonder if Subway is still running that $5 footlong deal. Boy, they have good pepperoncinis.”

In this day and age, a person on the phone is not necessarily a person on the phone and a person looking you in the eye might really be thinking, “McDonalds… I am lovin’ it!”

There’s a part of me that feels as if the discussion I raised the other day about how using technology in way that simply adds up to “digitalizing worksheets” devolved to a place where I feel I wasn’t quite paying heed to the idea that I really do recognize the potential — if not obvious — merits of technology. I have seen Smartboards, airliners, wikis, webquests, nings and the such used in a manner that absolutely legitimizes the credibility of the argument for 21rst century skills in the classroom… and I am a fan.

I’m sold!

However, everything I’ve seen that I greatly admire has a foundation in real human thought and deep student thinking.

Technology allows students to probe deeper and wider with more expediency and more efficiency (to name but a few of the benefits). Wielded properly, the case for utilizing 21rst century technology tools is virtually inarguable. The stuff rocks.

However… well, the however category might be the biggest technology hurdle out there — and the one that so few are addressing by name. Bigger than the expenditure, the PD needed, the retrofitting of all our current institutions and the investment we are going to need to make on a zillion other fronts is the “However category”.

The “However” category relates to fundamentally asking ourselves, “What is the goal of classroom education?” If technology is not meta-cognitively implemented with an eye on reflectively asking ourselves “what is the learning goal that this tool better empowers me to achieve” then we will quickly find ourselves losing the forest for the trees.

After all, if we do not ask the right questions there is a very low likelihood that we are going to stumble into the right answers.

I know the past few years of NCLB has seen an almost manic mandate to have teachers — especially new teachers — put the day’s “academic objective on the board at the front of the room”. (As if learning is a widget to be easily stamped; today we will be persuasive argument writers, tomorrow precise gerund users, Thursday will see us read Langston Hughes for subtext and Friday will see us master split infinitives. Oh, the buffoonery.)

However, with technology, having a clear, well thought-out student learning objective really is the compass by which one can navigate the use of technology. Now, I don’t want to double dip and plagiarize from myself (can one even be guilty of this?) because I talk address this issue in depth in my Scholastic book Teaching Teens and Reaping Results in Wi-Fi, Hip-Hop, Where Has All the Sanity Gone World, yet, the fact is, when you bring project-based learning into the classroom, you need to know what intellectual goal you are pursuing before you even begin — and you better tenaciously pursue that clear and focused aim because all the bells and whistles available in tech today are like a Siren Temptress of the Sea which can easily lead a teachers onto the calamitous rocks of classroom lesson implosion.

Tech needs a litmus test to justify its incorporation into a classroom. Know your objective and then, think like Einstein who often said, “Simplify, simplify simplify.”

If the tech shoe doesn’t fit, why force it?

One thing to really ensure that you nail the standards is to start with them. Don’t start with the methodology (as many educators do), start with the language arts standard, figure out the assessment and then determine how you will teach it. This is how you really lock in and make sure you hit your academic objective dead on.

For example, most teachers start with the methodology (i.e. they are going to teach a book like Dracula) and then they figure out what they are going to teach (i.e. they’ll teach symbolism) and then they figure out how to assess (i.e. I’ll give a quiz or project on symbolism.) As a Professor of Secondary Methodology in the Language Arts at Loyola Marymount University, I had to learn to teach teachers that when you teach kids in this manner, it’s not really the ideal way to make sure that you, as the educator, are drilling the core content standards the way you ought to.

Best to go…
1. Standards
2. Assessment
3. Methodology

This way you will know what you are teaching and you will know how you will measure whether or not you successfully taught it before you determine the materials you will use to do the teaching. (And this is why the standards are not text specific — more on that in a minute.)

Let’s look at it…

1. Decide to teach CA Language Arts Standards 3.7 (10th grade): Recognizing and Understanding the Significance of Symbolism in a text.
2. Have students identify, re-create (through a drawing, clip art, magazine pictures, and so on) and present a symbol from the text via the original creation of an independent poster board project.
3. Read Chapters 1 – 4 in Dracula and utilize this material as the basis for the assignment on symbolism.

Or you can use Twilight. Or you can use Monster. Or you can use Speak, The Outsiders or Freak the Mighty.

This is why the standards are, once again, not text specific. Find a book that engages your students and the standards can be a very valuable tool to make sure that you are focused like a laser on real classroom objectives while teaching high interest literature at the same time.

Oh how I wish someone had taught this to me when I first became a teacher. It’s made my life so much easier — and my classroom practice so much more effective.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, the standards are, for me, like a northern star, my unwavering compass as I try all kinds of crazy, far-reaching stuff to stretch my students’ minds.