Educational Leadership - February 2011

Perspectives
Click the icon
to listen to the podcast.
Screenagers: Making the Connections

“Education has to change. We can’t pull kids into learning in school if they are engaged in a different world outside school.” “If you don’t know how to use technology in class, you are in trouble. But, of course, technology is a double-edged sword. You can use it poorly, or you can use it well.”

The principals speaking were two f the candidates for the ASCD Outstanding Young Educator Award, which will be presented in March at ASCD’s Annual Conference in San Francisco. A group of us were interviewing 13 finalists—both administrators and teachers—over the course of a few weeks, and we were talking to them about their leadership, their creativity, their whole child philosophy, their impact on student achievement, and, of course, their technology use. All the educators spoke to us via Adobe ConnectPro, a two-way technology that allowed us to see, hear, and record them in their schools—whether in New York, Oregon, the Philippines, or places in between—while they viewed us in our meeting room in Alexandria, Virginia.

To a person, the candidates talked about effective technology use in their schools. We heard about outstanding history teachers using GoogleDocs to share different points of view, science teachers showing You Tube videos to illustrate scientific phenomena, English teachers employing clicker technology to have students weigh in before and after discussions, and music teachers creating electronic note recognition games. We also heard about educators designing class and school websites to engage their communities, tweeting to broadcast their pride in their schools, and analyzing electronic databases.

These educators also described such
engaging, blended- or low-tech learning
projects as making pancakes in science
class (an analogy for atom combi-
nation); preparing struggling readers to
conduct museum tours about Harlem
Renaissance artists; organizing honor
students to staff a homework café; and
dramatizing parodies of Macbeth’s
famous soliloquy about temptation. (“Is
this a dagger which I see before me?”
became “Is this a cupcake which I see
before me?” and so on.)

ways for students to develop richer, more complex mental representations of information. No longer should we describe teachers as “digital immigrants,” she notes. The highly connected teacher is no phantom of the future but is here today.

Of course, as Cator also warns,
adding any new technology—printing
press or computer—
amplifies some human
abilities and minimizes
others. For example, Mark
Bauerlein (p. 28) warns that
the meaning of complex texts
will elude students whose
brains and hands become
accustomed to digital distrac-
tions. “We should continue
to experiment with educa-
tional technology, but we
should also preserve a crucial place for
unwired, unplugged, and unconnected
learning,” he writes.

Our authors offer all kinds of ways to connect—and not connect—with screenagers. Among the topics are cell phones (pp. 39, 96), online courses (p. 63), websites (pp. 34, 60), school technology plans (p. 56), the prevention of online bullying (p. 48), electronic publishing (p. 22), and one-to-one computers (p. 78).

We’ll leave the last word of advice for educators to the screenagers we interviewed (p. 44). In a way, they echo the words of the outstanding young educators. “The most important thing for teachers is to be comfortable with what they are using. It doesn’t have to be super high tech,” one told us. And another: “Teachers shouldn’t be afraid of technology. Understand that it’s how we live our lives.”