Cycle Three Concluding Post: Technology as Tool, Technology as System

Thank you, everyone, for your work on this cycle! Your posts were essential reading as I—along with everyone else—tried to make sense of what this current public health crisis might mean for our collective future.

Many of you, as you reflected on the COVID-19 public health crisis, asked a series of related questions: Will education ever be the same? Didn’t the current crisis reveal a degree of unpreparedness by many public schools that will need to be rectified in the future? Don’t we need to make sure that the educational disruption that some children are experiencing does not happen again?

Put most broadly, most boldly, and, perhaps, most optimistically: Might we be witnessing the birth of a new form of public education?

While I have no answers or no predictions to any of these questions, I will share with you a few observations I’ve made after having read your posts.

As teachers, most of us have been trained to view technology as a tool. We are taught to ask: Is this specific technological application the right tool for the job at hand? Is Freckle or CrashCourse video going to enhance my instruction and assist me as I help my students reach state standards for their grade level?

But what this current moment is reminding me is that technology can also be a system. That is, it's not just a particular tool, but a series of interrelated tools that, working in interaction, can change the way we do things.

As educators, perhaps it’s time to stop looking for tools, and start thinking about systems.

Take Khan Academy. You could take any one of his videos and ask if it enhances instruction around a topic. For example, does this video on the French Revolution assist me as I aim to meet this standard:

Comparing Political Revolutions and/or Independence Movements – compare and contrast the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and one other revolution or independence movement that occurred in a region external to Europe from the standpoint of political, economic, and social causes and consequences. (Michigan Standards, p. 95)

This would be a pretty common approach in our current educational system.

But we have to remember that Khan built a series of videos and assessments that sequentially move through whole topics and courses. Not only that, he built a "dashboard" system that allows teachers to see the gaps a student currently has in real time—and that could be used to chart individualized progress towards individualized goals.

I think we are seeing the limits of thinking about technology as tool and starting to realize the necessity to embrace technology as a system. It might be that it's what pushes us over into a new way of thinking about school.

Who knows?

Oftentimes, as teachers, we find ourselves needing to move forward with our instruction so that we can “cover” all of the standards that we are expected to address through our curriculum. That, despite the fact that students might still not have mastered the material.

For some topics, it might be ok to move on before students have reached 100% mastery. But did we really think we could move on when we are dealing with such foundational skills as literacy and numeracy?

It's one thing if a child doesn't yet know the seven continents or the properties of matter. It's another if they are struggling to read. Having a series of videos, activities, and assessments—with real-time feedback and guidance—might provide the personalized approach to learning that would prevent us from having to teach topics and skills that some of our students are not yet ready to learn.

It is a premise of curriculum theory that determining what knowledge is of most worth is a political question. It will require deliberation and discussion.

But once a curricular framework is in place, it does seem like we need a more radically personalized instructional system than we currently have in place. Perhaps Khan will be the place where children go to learn reading and math? And perhaps school will be a place where we learn to go to work with others, to create art, and to solve the problems of the world.

What if the model developed by Greta were itself flipped? What if Fridays were devoted to learning fundamentals online (under the guidance of a parent or some other adult), and the other days of the week were spent in school trying to solve the great challenges our species now confronts?

What if didn’t need to strike against school in order to be involved in the real world?