Connect Education, Connect the World
Susanna Licciardi, Sardinia, Italy
Susanna Licciardi is an EFL teacher and a teacher trainer. Her experience goes from K12 students to University where she has been a teacher of English since 2002. She has always been interested in teaching with technology and its strategies and she held a number of presentations on this topic in national and international meetings such as British Council National Conference, TESOL Italy and CerCles. E-mail: susanna.licciardi@virgilio.it
Menu
Introduction
Sardinia speaks English
Scuola Digitale and SSE : a profitable parallel
Sardinia, America and the rest
The Great Challenge
ConnectED
Conclusion
References
In the preface to the first edition of his book Language and the Internet, David Crystal speaks with John Naughton’s words to describe the Internet as one of the most remarkable things ever made, potentially more powerful than any other in any sense. Some 15 years later, it could be said no comment was ever more appropriate while the whole world is still struggling to find a proper introduction of technology in education. More than one try has been done but the outcomes are rather controversial and the topic from here to there is still quite debatable.
In 2009 in Sardinia, an Italian island with a special statute to help overcome the historical economic gap originated by la questione meridionale, the local administration succeeded in drawing up an agreement, called Scuola Digitale-LIM, with the central government and the ministry of education to transform the island in a sort of capital of digital innovation.
Scuola Digitale-LIM aimed at a carpet introduction of technology in any school level, starting from K-12 students to secondary students (14 to 19) with the purpose of fighting the high rates of drop out and help those many students, who couldn’t find any interest in a traditional educational approach, to get involved and progress.
Not to be compared to what President Barack Obama said when addressing the State of Union in 2011 “(..) if we want to win the future - if we want innovation to produce jobs in America and not overseas - then we also have to win the race to educate our kids”, Scuola Digitale-LIM wasn’t as much direct and aggressive, was not focussed on leaving other countries behind but was for sure a great project.
It was based on the optimistic assumption that “(...) learning technical devices are simple and user-friendly applications and since they do not ask for specific skills (..) they immediately make the users autonomous” and was divided in different steps meaning to involve about 70.000 teachers.
Thanks to one hundred and twenty million European euros, interactive boards of the then last generation were to be spread on a one-to-one basis among educational institutions, IPads to teachers and students, transforming the island in the proud paladin of technological innovation in the whole country.
Great interest was aroused by the second step of the project where practice and theory were to meet and be analized, discussed, confirmed or disconfirmed, giving a sense to the experimental phase before a wide general implementation.
Sparkling debates started here and there to welcome or reject the idea of a new way to manage contents but, since just having technological devices ready there does not automatically mean to have skills too, it was immediately clear to all that most of the teachers were absolutely unequipped not only of the basics to face such a novelty but even of the ideological prerequisites to welcome the change. The idea that in some time from then, paper books would be banned from the schools started to cause big distress to many but nevertheless, the plan went on: avant-garde classes were formed to experiment new approaches, new media studies were started in some universities and techno skills were included in the list of necessary qualifications to get a teaching job. Meanwhile, the central government enacted the norm according to which in less than five years from then, exactly 2013, paper books would disappear to foster the introduction of e.books.
Simultaneously, and peculiarly, in the same period of time and under a project with the name of Sardinia Speaks English, huge extra funds from the UE again were allocated to universities and schools to massively improve the teaching of English in the effort to keep the pace with the rest of the country and the world.
Classes were opened to anyone from 18 to 60 years old of age : thousands of students, from elementary to graduation, and big part of the population were, for years and for free, involved in a mass hysteria for English as never before, if not in some trendy or wealthy context where English had always represented the key to the world.
Studying English, in schools which were already or were going to be equipped with the latest technology around, with good technological teachers, became something social. Students from the same language class met on social networks to form groups to speak English or to update with the latest news, while adults realized that evening classes, not very common in the island before, could be an opportunity to learn a language in a more modern, technological and involving way. Loads of mother tongue teachers and mother tongue willing-to-be teachers found their ‘America’ in Sardinia and sardinians felt international.
The well-timed out of Scuola Digitale and SSE, the immense coincidence of two projects addressed to innovation, took the citizens of this island in the mediterranean sea to become the navel of the country and have, once in history, the possibility to redeem itself from its destiny, becoming a centre of excellence for the latest researches in Europe : English and Technology . It could be said that local administrators, more than before, had proved themselves to be sensitive receptors of the issues that are gnawing even the biggest nations, and used their best energies to give a strong push to the local economy in the short run, and a big hope for the future of the island in the long run.
It has been more than ten years now since all of this started : many more Sardinians speak English, technology has been included in almost all aspects of people’s life and work, and even if IPads are not a reality everywhere yet, and some of the steps have been delayed by the recent economical crisis, it is very common, if not completely ordinary, to perceive life in a digital way. With the exception of school.
Technological devices are not in fact so popular at school as it had been anticipated, and school actors, namely students, teachers and why not families, have not changed much of their approach to learning. LIMs are, in most cases, used as cinema screens or Power Point screens (just two of the possible options) and a substantial number of teachers do still have to start to think of technology as a support to their teaching. Should somebody remove paper from education, they would feel deprived, feeling part of a weird school and they have never thought along these years to speed up improving their techno skills, disrespectful of the expiring date -2013- trumpeted by governments getting closer. Paper is still considered as the only teaching media at any level, primary secondary or university, photocopiers do work as much as before and everybody starts and gets back to paper with may be just some integrative deviations not to disturb the full-length papery stream.
More than one reason could be easily listed to explain such a reaction: the school population was not ready to such a revolution yet; they were influenced by the typical attitude of insularity (to get to things with a slow rhythm waiting for new ideas and trends come from far away or abroad); they were perplexed by the digitalized versions of the materials they had been using before on paper; they disbelieved in a rapid, clever and balanced change or, last but not least, they were concerned/ aware that sooner or later funds would finish and cuts would hit school as usual.
Now that this last prevision has come to be true (confirmed by the little time and attention which was given to this topic at the Regional Conference for Research and Innovation 2012 and by a launch from the government to postpone the expiring date and the introduction of e.books to 2015 caused by the difficulty to digitalize all the materials), more than someone must have seen their opinions confirmed : no funds, no additional tools, no matching between the experimentation and the results, no innovation, no room for a possible real new method in teaching with techonology but just the digitalization of the old materials to push techonological tools sellings. A general feeling of uncertainty and a sense of discouragement have now taken those who had believed in the great revolution and welcomed it : Sardinia, the accidental navel of the technological revolution, is losing a wonderful opportunity and is making a step backward in time.
Sardinia has always been connected in some ways with the United States. It was quite a strategic location for the American army during I and II world war and still has a number of basis dislocated throughout the island which represent an economic opportunity for small villages and towns that look up at the USA for inspiration. America, in terms of education, is now peculiarly facing a similar situation.
The report from Teachers College,Columbia University, given at the Academic Festival 2012, in regards to technology says infact that they are struggling, too.
The reasons for this struggle, and the profiles of the individuals who are in some ways dis/connected with techonology, are mostly similar to the ones in Sardinia : those who play the ‘wait and see’game in a very slow rythmn, those who are counting the days before retirement (and avoid any kind of involvement and participation in the process), those who cannot see the advantages of teaching and learning with technology, and the early adopters who think they do not need any further contact.
Plans to fight these attitudes have been started at Teachers College: teachers are trained to produce in project design context, helped consider the importance of regular objective assessment, and showed how some parts of their teaching steps are already embedded in some of the devices.
School leaders are involved in the activities, too, because they need to have a general vision of what is teaching with technology. They are recommended to support the use of these tools among teachers and persuaded to reward those who try to do it in ways they think are very much engaging for learning. This is because the wide range of existing devices, and the new ones coming out literally every day, impede a suitable training pace asking teachers an immense capacity of adaptation as never before.
The results to these commitments and actions appear to be very good in the state of New York but not in urban or rural areas and the picture, in higher education, is even more complicated.
In the recent past students would find every needed technology in the campus, would respect the professors assignements, and adapt themselves to the uni environment and requests. They now are, not only equal owners of tools but, in many cases, off-campus creators of new tools.
As a consequence, instead of submitting their projects in the course platform they had been asked to, they may happen to do it in an application that teachers do not even have, because those systems were autonomously and uniquely created for that purpose.
Here then comes the magic and the contradiction of technology : the possibility to make a learning process unique, the possibility to democratize education, making the process of education your own process, is at the same time the un-democratic side of education for those students who do not have the equal opportunity to own/know the latest devices or are themselves unskilled to create their own applications or for those teachers who no sooner do they set up for a class than find themselves thrown in a new context without having been anticipated or without having been given the time to know and adapt!
No surprise if many do not welcome and do not take technology in their teaching/learning, discouraged as they are by all the difficulties and quests that this represents.
Such a similitude among countries, Sardinia and America, even consistently far away from each other for more than one reason, very different in culture and economy and with opposite positions in the dynamics of political relationships, has been created by a huge phenomenon that is now involving the education system of the whole world, putting on the same level actors and characters who have traditionally had very different roles.
Graham Brown Martin, co-founder of LearningwithoutFrontiers and big provocateur, at Learingwithoutfrontiers 2011, anticipated “the disruption of a super structured school system by the game developers who are creating just looking at the way kids are already learning” and compared the world of education to the world of music, both victims of a perverse and unstoppable revolution from the outside.
The term napsterfication, from the name of the peer-to-peer file sharing software Napster, that unexpectedly burst into the market destroying for some years the music system introducing piracy as a way to get materials without paying, wants to describe the attack school is living from the techno monster economies. School, he said, should immediately try to update or it will soon be ditched by a new system, with may be different goals than education and “game developers who are creating just looking at the way kids are already learning” in the place of the teachers.
Believe it or not, while trying to figure out those game developers in the classroom to suddenly hold lesson after having designed a possible valid balanced and educative syllabus for their students, the whole of the actors involved in the school system, students and families, directors and headmasters, feel the pressure. Every day they are told that school is dead without technology, that there is no other way to learn if not with technology, forced day by day, from here and there, to think it is no good anymore.
Everyone has agreed on that technology is the big issue in education. The Great Challenge is to have effective, fluent, techno skilled teachers soon in any school level, have them convinced of what they are doing and how they are doing it and, last but not least, have them have easy access to devices and tools. But teaching with technology is difficult.
Technology changes the general balance teachers have always been used to. They have to reinvent their teaching style, starting from their seats to the students seats. They have to change the approach to content - to testing - to timing in the class and when preparing lessons at home - to distances - to light - to floor apportion - to gazes - to glances - to speaking turns - to use of voice - to use of silence - to devices they are supposed to know and have in order to be effective - to the literature to tell them what they are doing the way they are doing will work with their students - to colleagues with which they would like to compare and rethink and rebalance their plans – to assessment- to families who should themselves be educated to the great shift in their children learning and more.
The new generation of young teachers, the native digital ones, is the great hope in this sense but they should be trained on how to teach since it is now clear that introducing technology in teaching does not necessarily mean good learning. Besides nobody has ever made a census of those teachers who have already started and regularly use technology in their class.
Most of the times, unless talking of private top level schools, they are rarely monitored, and headmasters very often do not even know their teachers’ curricula or skills. Locating teachers who already use technology fluently and have valuable skills, needs a plan, an organization, a proper research and the use of data, in one word money.
Furthermore devices are, for now, expensive. They have short duration in terms of modernity, need frequent maintenance and frequent checking and schools are suffering from the economic crisis more than other sectors. The multiplicity of new devices/applications practically thrown at you every day, makes it more economical to manage but this means anyway a new asset in terms of balance from the schools and, most of all, from the families.
Whoever, for whatever reason, is not adequately equipped to participate the match is automatically out of the game or bound to the margins and it is easy to imagine that all the burdens are dumped on to the families putting under serious risk any further policy of inclusion. As Jeffrey Sachs said “(..)these tools are multipliers and magnify differences in any population”.
Thinking of the Title II, part D of the No Child Left Behind Act, 2002 (Enhancing education through technology), fear is that loads of children, not necessarily from the poorest countries in the world, from Sardinia to America, could be left behind if a global plan with shared decisions and policies was not undertaken.
Barack Obama’s latest plan on technology launched in 2013 but perfected in some new commitments announced at Buck Lodge Middle School, 4/2/2014, has come to correct these most shadowy aspects of the Great Challenge and to work on the weakest sides of it: teachers and devices.
The first ones, unqualified unskilled inexperienced or lost, and the second ones simply missing.
Teachers, “from any school at any time”, who have worked subjected to decisions that have been taken over their heads, who were sometimes invited in big numbers to training courses where new approaches (?) are explained from a faraway stage or showed in video from a faraway screen, with no students to play-act and reproduce an imaginative context to work out a teaching process, some kind of realistic situation to understand what it would be in a real teaching-learning environment, “will open their classrooms to interactive demonstrations and lessons from world-renowned experts, and have the opportunity to build learning communities collaborating with other educators across the country or world”.What best place if not the classroom to equip teachers with the best strategies, job shadowing the world renowned experts, in a real hands-on-techno-teaching-context?
The ConnectED initiative invests in improving the skills of teachers, ensuring that every educator in America receives support and training (…) to keep pace with changing technological and professional demand (…) the Department of Education will work with states and school districts to invest in this kind of professional development to help teachers keep pace with changing technology.
School, “today average school”, where LIMs are Power Points Presentations displays, where not every student owns their devices, “where only around 30% of our students have true high speed Internet in the classroom”, will receive contributions in terms of devices and services from big multinationals like Apple, Sprint, Verizon, At&T, Microsoft and will have some 20 million students connected to high speed broadband clockwise so as to be able to finish their tasks when home.
For years, here and there, teachers, intellectuals or philanthropists like Sir David Puttnam had cried the need for help, the need for a collaboration from and among the parties and now, facing the failure of an expected spontaneous shifting from the black-board to the screen board, from the book to the IPad, here comes the most awaited move to bail school out of the mire.
A very good example of collaboration had come from the oil company Chevron in 2012 to show how, in times of hard times we should change out approach to business finding a two-parts synergy. Its idea was campaigned all over the world, may be and luckily inspiring ConnectED.
Every day, Chevron relies on small business around the world.
Electricians. Mechanics. Manufacturers.
We spent billions on local goods and
services last year.
And helped thousands of entrepeneurs
get ahead with microloans.
We’re helping small business thrive. WE AGREE
Because we need them. Steve Tomkovicz Leo Lonergan
Just as much as they need us. President Chief Procurement Office
If we wanted to play with the text, we could easily replace the key words extending the agreement to the world of education at its full, in either one’s interest. With John Thomson in place of Steve Tomkovicz and, time by time, the Headmasters of small schools round the corners in place of Leo Lonergan.
Every day, Microsoft/Verizon/At&T/etc relies on small schools around the world.
Teachers. Families. Headmasters.
We spent billions on donations and
services last year.
And helped thousands of students
get ahead with education.
We’re helping small schools thrive. WE AGREE
Because we need them. John Thomson
Just as much as they need us. President Department Head
The agreement could be done, must be done, especially with those schools where the unequal distribution of resources reinforces differences because as J. Sachs best said “we are now facing three paramount aspects in teaching with technology : economical - because technology asks for resources and resources are not equally distributed, environmental - because technology jeopardizes the planet, personal - because technology can be creative and make learning personal and suitable to the one persona, social - because technology can very easily let big masses of people in or down them at the border of big decisions, and it can be dangerous. Technology, or what technology allows you to do, is connected to morality and it can play against it or against culture and education”.
Lauren Simenauer and Sean Pool in their comment on the future of Arpa-Ed ( Digital Promise Center, which American Congress authorized in 2008 and expanded in 2010 changing its name) said “America’s children deserve the best education science can bring them”.
It is great to think any children, any nationality, from any country, Americans Sardinians or others, deserve the best education science, i.e. technology, can bring them , and it is even greater to think one day soon the whole world will be connectED shifting the competition on a different level than equipment because missing the biggest opportunity the world has ever had to care for inclusion and equality, would be the most solemn capital sin of all.
David Crystal, 2006 Language and the internet, 2nd edn CUP
Lord Puttnam, 2008 Handheld Learning Conference, London
Adam Richardson, 2011 Where No Child Left Behind Went Wrong, Harward Business Review
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/10/wherenochildleftbehindwen.html
Antony Salcito,2011 The new classroom experience, Learningwithoutfrontiers London
www.learningwithoutfrontiers.com
Lauren Simenauer and Sean Pool, 2011 Arpa-Ed and the future of education innovation,
Science progress journal
http://scienceprogress.org/2011/10/arpa-ed-and-the-future-of-education-innovation/
Graham Brown Martin,2011 The Napsterfication of school, Learningwithoutfrontiers London www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShzaZUYaZw
No Child Left Behind Act, Title II, part D
www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg34.html
Ken Robinson, 2011 Leading a learning revolution, Learningwithoutfrontiers, London www.learningwithoutfrontiers.com
Chevron campaign 2012, www.chevron.com/media/ads/printweagreesmallbusiness.pdf
Luyen Chow,2012 Realizing the promise of technology in the classrom, Teachers College Academic Festival, panel
www.tc.columbia.edu/#news-section-2
Columbia University, State of New York, Welcome Page
www.tc.columbia.edu/tcnyc/index.htm
Ellen Meyer, 2012 Realizing the promise of technology in the classroom, panel, Academic Festival, Teachers College, Columbia University, www.tc.columbia.edu/#news-section-2
Jeffrey Sachs, 2012 Keynote address, Academic Festival, Teachers College, Columbia University http://www.tc.columbia.edu/
President Barack Obama, 2014 at Buck Lodge Middle School
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JKB163MmVA
ConnectED, 2014 White House full text
www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/connected_fact_sheet.pdf
Please check the Teaching Languages Using Technologies course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Using Mobile Technology course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology & Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
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