When Technology Works for Schools

NAIS President Patrick F. Bassett

W

hen I talk with school heads about challenges for the school community, "managing technology" comes close to the top of everyone's list. After a decade of investment and considerable expansion into domains (literally) not even conceived of a generation ago, school leaders wonder how to make good decisions regarding technology, decisions that will have a "return on investment." Of course, just about everyone is clamoring for more hardware, a larger tech staff, faster and wireless Internet access, better interactive websites, and more mobile hardware. The demand is outpacing the ability of most schools to respond, considering that independent schools like to make careful, deliberate decisions: seeing what results they get from previous investments before making major new ones. Given this, how do we even begin to design an "outcomes" metric for investment in technology?

In thinking about this, I am reminded of the sixth and final principle of Jim Collins' seminal work on transforming organizations, Good to Great: Use technology as the accelerator of momentum, not the source of it. It's an important principle that, unfortunately, not many schools, public or private, have followed to date. The typical -- and costly -- approach has been, "Invest first, then figure out how to use it."

The good news is that, even with some stumbling around, most schools now have the technology infrastructure they need to invest wisely hereafter. According to Collins, organizations that do so are deliberate in focusing technology to accelerate their "hedgehog" concept -- i.e., that which they do better than anyone else and that to which their "economic engine" is tied. For independent schools, our "hedgehog concept" is to hire bright, passionate, and compassionate teachers, give them freedom and reasonable workloads, and ask them to transform the lives of kids.

So how would schools use technology to accelerate their hedgehog concept? Schools could start by asking their technology task force that very question, in the context of four clearly evolving technology trends:

THE CONVERGENCE OF MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES

When I dropped my Blackberry PDA on the sidewalk in Montreal recently, I was glad to see it survived the fall -- given its value to me in my work. It allows me the ability to check my e-mail, consult my office calendar, answer a call, browse the Internet, and add "Tasks" to my Outlook list. As much as I appreciate this digital device, however, I find myself already looking forward to its next iteration, an even more sophisticated one-stop mobile tool that permits me access to wireless voice, Internet, e-mail, and my desktop applications. Similar devices already offer still and video camera components that would allow me to record events or interviews and wirelessly post them to the Web or send them as an e-mail attachment to a colleague. Yet other similar devices permit one to store documents and applications (as my BMW watch does with a built-in memory chip and USB port), and to access maps and directions via GPS satellites. Soon, the convergences of all these applications and features will allow -- and encourage -- what the technology has been pointing towards all along: anywhere/anytime access to anything.

These portable, hand-held (and fairly indestructible) devices have already begun to penetrate the school market -- and will clearly do so with great rapidity in the near future. The question for educators is how best to employ them in the goals of education. How might they transform our approach to teaching and learning for the better?

THE UBIQUITY OF INFORMATION

The increasing ubiquity of digital information in our everyday lives, through Internet technology, is breaking down barriers and borders faster than we could have imagined 20 years ago -- and without the bother of asking our permission to do so! Largely, the new technologies are improving our lives and, in some cases, saving them. The world now enjoys 24/7-access to the resources we want or need for our vocations and avocations; to our bank accounts (and to counsel that may help those accounts grow); and to our medical records (and to expert diagnostic descriptions that make us better educated customers in seeking medical care and formulating our own "second opinions"). The wide-open nature of the Internet also allows for the analysis and assessment of art, politics, and social movements by voices outside of the control of media conglomerates. These increasingly democratized voices are transforming opinion and perspectives, and opening up cultures across the globe.

Of course, there is the well-publicized (and quite real) downside to this ubiquity of information, including the constant marketing blitz of the corporate world, the proliferation of Internet pornography, and the general overload of digital entertainment. So schools will need to continue to consider how they will control access to the corrupting influences of unwanted digital information and yet provide access to the broadest array of valuable information and quality thinking on just about every subject.

THE EXPANSION OF WHAT WE MEAN BY "TECHNOLOGY" IN SCHOOLS

There are now independent schools whose definition of "technology" has expanded well beyond laptops for all students and faculty or wireless access to the Internet. The early adapters now have substantial "Power Tool Tech Labs" with the most amazing equipment for students to use -- just as engineers or architects or industrial designers would use in the field. Our school labs of the future may well include sophisticated digital video devices, instruments for development of nanotechnologies, devices for molecular experiments and research, and advanced forensic tools. Independent schools are investing in equipment for computer-assisted design (CAD) tools that link to sophisticated production molding devices that, in turn, produce actual prototypes of new products. We know that Segway (the personal transportation device) and Roomba (the robot vacuum cleaner) and Packbot (the military robot) have obvious commercial origins, so what new products will students in our schools invent (and perhaps boards provide the venture capital to develop)? Will schools participate in international competitions, like those whose goal is to produce a robot that goes into a burning building to save an article or a robot that flies from point A, retrieves an object, and delivers it to point B via a GPS satellite system?

If your school has not entertained such possibilities for teaching and learning via an expanded definition of technology, would you want to begin to do so now?

THE IINTEGRATION OF THE WEB INTO ALL ASPECTS OF TEACHING AND LEARNING

Of course, the great revolution of technology has not been the computer as much as it has been what digitalizing of information used by the computer has spawned: the Web. The great revolution for teaching and learning the Web has brought to us is, in my opinion, the single greatest revolution in the history of education: the decentralizing of the sources of information and knowledge. This changes everything. The teacher no longer holds the key to wisdom and information, now that students have access to competing wisdom and information (and are typically facile at finding it). Furthermore, schools going "beyond borders" are finding global partnering possibilities facilitated via the Web. Schools leading the way belong to organizations like Global Connections or Round Square or School Year Abroad and are making direct partnerships with sister schools abroad; the new way to travel will be to use the Web to make virtual partnerships that will go well beyond "pen pals" or even student and teacher exchanges to "teaming" and "projects" and "problem-solving" exercises.

In addition, via the Web, "recording student progress" will take on literal meaning beyond the paper report card and comment. Electronic student portfolios for student-led conferencing and web-based tracking of student progress will become virtual biographies of learning, as a student's teachers videotape his or her first-grade reading aloud, the second-grade recitation of a poem, the fifth-grade rendition of the Gettysburg Address, the ninth-grade peroration from Julius Caesar, and the 12th-grade extemporaneous address to the school assembly.

Is your school seeing the Web both as the window to the world and the door to the school?

DEVELOPMENT OF FACULTY WITH HIGH-LEVEL TECHNOLOGY SKILLS

Clearly, schools will continue to hire and train for technology skills, but soon they'll start rewarding faculty differentially for those whose skills actually transform teaching and learning. Professional development in technology will continue to move in the direction of "just in time" training: tech staff (including student interns) will provide training whenever and wherever for teachers on the skills a teacher will need next week for his or her class. Teachers themselves will write blogs; they will capitalize upon free open-source software for interactive class websites; they will use selections from their students' electronic portfolios as their best defense against broadsides from www.ratemyteacher.com. Research on teaching and learning will be led by networked teacher groups that experiment with new approaches and record them to share with peers around the world.

What technology clearly offers teachers is a new way of looking at the art of teaching. How invested is your school in helping teachers reclaim leadership in the process -- with technology and via technology?

Finally, with technology, as with all change, we must remember that it is, in Malcolm Gladwell's term, the "tipping point" agent who transforms the rest of us; I'd invest most of my future technology dollars in those folks, first.

Patrick F. Bassett is president of NAIS.