Fish is Fish

One of the most beautiful things about having a child is how it reconnects you with your own childhood. Over the holidays, with Georgina spending more time at my mother's place, her grandmother went scurrying into the bedroom and dug out some of my old books so I could read them to my daughter. One that caught my eye was one I have vivid memories of, 'Fish is Fish'. The illustration above particularly sticks in my mind.

The storyline goes along the lines of two friends, a fish and a tadpole, grow up together in a pond. The tadpole slowly becomes a frog, and eventually is able to hop out of the pond, leaving the fish behind. When he returns, he describes to the fish the wondrous things he has seen, like birds, cows, and people. The fish, naturally, imagines these things as fish with wings, fish with udders, fish in clothing, and so on. With an inability to imagine a totally different reality, the fish simply superimposes the new on the old.

I found this a pretty strong metaphor for technology's role in education. When I started tinkering with technology in my teaching, it was basically a fish with wings - the same course I usually ran, with additional material to support the students. And as I became more involved with technology in education in other schools, I saw more of the same. The way 'in' with teachers was to show them how technology could help them do the same things they were currently doing, better. Some examples include:

• Replacing writing in an exercise book with writing in a Word document
• Replacing library research with Google searches
• Replacing posters with Glogs
• Adding PowerPoints to class presentations
• Augmenting traditional teaching with videos
• Replacing skill and drill sheets and games with things like Mathletics

Now, I'm not here to pooh-pooh these things. I use many of these things in my teaching, and they present real advantages over traditional ways of doing things. But they are not transformative in an educational sense. The advantages will always be limited by the fact that they are simply new ways of doing old things. If we want to see real change, we need to reimagine education, rather than simply put wings on a fish.

Another level of using technology to reimagine education might be:

• Global audiences and collaboration

While we can now allow our students to present their work in new ways, we need to think about what motivates students to do the work in the first place. Students are motivated by purpose - and having an audience much larger than their own class or school can be a great motivator. This concept seems to stretch teachers' ideas about what school is; we still celebrate students participating in local competitions (as we should), but we're curiously indifferent to the idea of students showcasing their work on a national or global scale. We still rejoice in students working across classes or grades within a school, but can't imagine students working with others on the other side of the globe. It's a globally connected world these kids are going into, whether we like it or not. Education needs to reflect this, and the easiest, cheapest and in some ways most relevant way is to use technology to do this.

• Virtual teachers

Even in a technologically-rich classroom, the teacher is still the teacher. The learning experiences of the students are still limited by the expertise, passion and interest of the individual teacher. Yet there are professionals out there -  scientists, historians, filmmakers, engineers - who are willing to inspire and guide students in their field of expertise.

This isn't a new thing. Having guest speakers come in is a long-established tradition, and the 'fish with wings' version - having a guest speaker on Skype - is taking hold in some technology rich classrooms. The Skype guest speaker means that it is easier and cheaper for guest speakers to connect with their classrooms, and classrooms that are geographically isolated are able to access speakers previously difficult to access.

But a step further is to have these professionals as virtual teachers - constant, occasional providers of assistance to students with particular interests or goals. And rather than the guest speaker model, where the teacher and speaker guide the interaction, the technology can put the power of these interactions in the hands of the students themselves.

 

The temptation when talking to teachers about experts is to get people who can physically be there - people in the community who can come in, spend a day with the kids, help out in the classroom. That's great, but why be limited by who can come in, though? When that community member leaves the classroom, if you need assistance, they've gone. Moreover, learning in the 21st century means leveraging the expertise of people you've never met - in some ways, the expertise is secondary to the method of obtaining it: 24/7, student initiated, and not a member of the school community in the traditional sense.

• Personalised learning

While technology has often enhanced the courses we teach, the students still tend to learn the same things at the same pace. The use of video, for example, can do more. Students can now use video to learn different material, material that may not be traditionally taught in the year level of that teacher. This means that students who need to either reinforce concepts not learned earlier on their education, or who have already mastered a concept to move onto a new concept, have the opportunity to do so. And it means that students are not restricted to timelines imposed by the teacher.

Again, this is a major shift in the way most educators think about education. We fear students doing nothing with their new-found freedom; we fear students doing work above their level when they really need reinforcement of work done in class; we fear the stigma of 'streaming' and the social isolation that goes along with it.

Yet my experience has been the opposite. By providing students with the right structure, students are more accountable; higher-end students are far more engaged rather than being bored; technology allows students to be with their classmates working at different levels, rather than hived off into separate streamed classes; and struggling students actually increase their confidence by having work they can actually complete, rather than being perpetual strugglers.

Can we rethink education like this, or will our attempts to use technology always be limited by our traditional views of school? For after all, no matter if you put wings, udders, or legs on them, fish is fish.