Managing Digital Distractions in School

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How do we build habits in our classrooms around digital devices so that they don’t become distractions that get in the way of teaching and learning? The easy solution is to ban them, but that takes a powerful learning tool out of your students’ hands. According to Edutopia’s “Digital Tools and Distraction in School,” it’s important for teachers to teach students how to manage their attention with their devices and explain what multitasking is doing to their ability to effectively complete their work. I’ve conducted assemblies at Polson where I’ve addressed self-management in these terms, offering tips to keep distractions at bay, and I plan on continuing to address this issue. But I need your help in getting this message to resonate with kids. Check out the article above, and feel free to comment below on how you’re setting the tone at the start of the new school year to limit digital distractions in your classroom, without banning devices altogether.

Let the Sparks Fly

Adobe has just release a suite of products that have amazing potential when it comes educational applications. In fact, it’s the best educational technology tool I’ve come across in the past year, joining the ranks of the Google Apps suite, WeVideo, Kahoot, and Diigo. It’s called Adobe Spark and consists of three web apps: Spark Page, Spark Post, and Spark Video. They are all easy to use and work on any device–Mac/PC, Chromebook, or Android/iOS. Each has its own mobile app, so you can start a project on one device and finish it on another. Setting up an account is as easy…like a lot of web apps these days, you just log in with your Google username and password. Oh, and it’s free! Here’s a brief overview on each one…

My favorite is probably Spark Page. Compared to the other Spark apps, I see more potential in Page across subjects and grade levels. Basically it allows you to create visual web stories, or the kind of modern, media-rich articles you’ve probably come across on the Web. In addition to text, students can add scrolling images with captions, videos, links, and photo galleries. It’s easier to create than a website, but can be shared across the Web just as easily to reach an authentic audience. And it’s super slick. Here’s an example I made about a global social issue that social studies teachers might have their students examine. Click through to see how it all unfolds. Main 21st Century Capacities: Synthesizing, Analyzing, Design, Imagining, Product Creation, Engaging in Global Issues, Citizenship

Fighting to End Child Labor/Slavery

Next is Spark Post. It allows you to design great looking graphics meant to be posted somewhere on the Web, whether it’s a meme, a flyer, an announcement, an advertisement, cover art, you name it. Here’s another example that serves as a companion to the Spark Page project above. Main 21st Century Capacities:  Design, Product Creation, Presentation, Engaging in Global Issues, Citizenship

Adobe Spark Chocolate

And then there’s Spark Video (formerly Adobe Voice). It’s essentially a digital storytelling app that allows you to create and narrate animated videos that contain images, icons, and text. It’s also easy to use and comes with themes and templates, such as Promote an Idea, Tell What Happened, A Hero’s Journey, Personal Growth, and Teach a Lesson. I haven’t created one yet, but you can visit Spark’s Inspiration Gallery to get some ideas. Main 21st Century Capacities:  Synthesizing, Design, Imagining, Product Creation, Presentation, Engaging in Global Issues, Citizenship, Perserverance

As the year winds down, time is a rare commodity. But if you made it to the bottom of this post, you could probably spare a few more minutes to explore Spark. So if you’re looking to try something new to keep your students engaged at the end of the year, let me know, and I’ll be happy to explore its potential with you.

A More Balanced Tech Diet

This report from EdWeek confirms what I’ve always believed: While they are powerful learning tools, smartphones and tablets are addictive little devices, and we need to monitor our use of them. But the biggest takeaway for me: The need for a balanced tech diet. Our students need “media mentors” both at school and home. Simply restricting their use of technology doesn’t work and instead leads to more problematic behaviors.

Image by adactio, on Flickr

As for the educational use of these addictive devices, here’s another great read from The Atlantic about how incorporating purposeful smartphone use into classroom activity can be especially challenging, specifically with underachieving students. The article concludes…

So, is the best learning environment one that’s free from digital distractions for struggling learners—a refuge from the constant barrage of information? Or should schools adapt to the realities of a hyper-connected world in which the vast majority of students carry access to almost-infinite information in their pockets? Or is there a middle ground? … there is no simple answer.

The Value of Formative Assessments and How Technology Can Facilitate It

This article from Edutopia really underscores why we need regular formative assessments in our classrooms, and it suggests some great technology tools that help teachers conduct quick formative checks. The one I’ve promoted on this blog before is Socrative, and it’s number 1 on the author’s list. Since then, Socrative has been updated with some new features, which you learn about on by watching the video below.

Leveraging Technology for Learning with the SAMR Model (Part 4)

As the name indicates, every post on this blog is about leveraging technology for learning. But I’ve been focusing this current series of posts on the SAMR model as a tool for determining how we leverage technology, and how we can use it to transform student learning. For this post, the last in this series, I’d like to focus on how mobile devices have the potential to change the way we learn.

When I think about the biggest impact my smartphone has had on my life, it’s not the ability to capture any of life’s moments with a good camera that’s always with me. That’s pretty high on the list, but it’s really the way my phone allows me to satisfy my curiosity and provide me with the information I need, on demand, at any given moment (provided I’m not in a “dead zone”). I’ve heard some refer to smartphones as “wonder-killers” and I appreciate that perspective…a lot of rich conversations revolve around trying to remember the details of our collective past, or wondering and guessing at interesting questions that arise. If overused to satisfy our daily wonderings, especially in social settings, don’t we run the risk of losing something special and unique to our humanity and move one step closer to The Singularity?

While I try to keep this question in the back of my mind while using technology, I prefer to view my smartphone as a curiosity-statisfier, rather than a wonder-killer. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked something up on my phone to help me solve a problem, satisfy a curiosity, or simply learn something new. Smartphone technology and mobile apps have gotten so good, that they’ve become excellent research tools and have great potential to fuel inquiry-based learning. Thanks to bigger screens and faster Internet speeds (both WiFi and cellular), it’s becoming harder to brush smartphones and tablets off as research tools with the argument that you really need a much bigger screen and a keyboard to do any serious research.

This article about how BYOD programs can fuel inquiry-based learning offers some good insights in terms of how to make smartphones and tablets work as learning and research tools. As Tim Clark, coordinator of instructional technology for Forsyth County Schools in Georgia, notes: “Kids already know how to use their devices, but they don’t know how to learn with their devices,” suggesting that the teacher’s role is to help them discover how a device that was previously used only for texting, gaming, and social networking can actually be a powerful learning tool. Of course, this means that their teachers need to get comfortable using their mobile devices as research tools along with information gathering apps like Diigo (which I explained in Part 3 of this series) and Google Drive. Like anything else, using mobile devices and new apps takes practice, and that, of course, takes time. None of us have enough of it, but when you find it, let me know and I’ll be happy to help you get more comfortable using mobile devices in your classroom in transformative ways, whether it be during a planning period, PLC meeting, or after school.

Aside from time, what are some other hurdles keeping you from embracing regular use of mobile devices in your classroom? Are your students too young to handle the responsibility of bringing their own devices to school? Until high-quality tablets cost under $100, that hurdle may be too high to overcome for elementary teachers. Is it an equity issue…worried about the haves and the have-nots? That’s a valid concern to which we should all be sensitive. But with our growing supply of Chromebooks and laptops, shouldn’t we start considering putting those devices into a lending pool at the middle and high schools, rather than dedicate them all to carts that teachers check out for the whole class? This way students can use a Chromebook for the day if they can’t or don’t want to bring their tablet, smartphone, or personal laptop to school. Whatever the obstacle, leave a comment below so we can figure out how to overcome them. Or, if you have a mobile learning success story, please share that as well. Thanks for reading!

POST-SCRIPT…

While I highly recommend the article I linked at the top of the fourth paragraph, it comes up short in terms of explaining how to get started with the inquiry process, with or without mobile devices. No one has mastered this process better than the fine folks over at The Right Question Institute. Their website offers some great resources that will help you get your students asking their own meaningful questions for deep exploration, but if you’re looking to master inquiry-based learning, you should really check out the book Make Just One Change, by RQI directors Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana. While I’m no master yet, I’ve used their strategies with MPS teachers, and they work!

make-just-one-change-cover

 

Leveraging Technology for Learning with the SAMR Model (Part 3)

While the first post in this series presented foundational information about the SAMR model, which can be used to assess how we use technology in our classrooms, the second gave specific examples of how teachers can leverage technology to enhance and begin transforming learning. Part 3 will now focus solely on practices and tasks that were previously inconceivable without the technology — those practices that sit solidly in the R of SAMR: Redefinition (see graphic below).

In order to redefine learning tasks and transform learning, technology has to allow for the creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable. Sound like a pretty tall order? Well, it’s actually not, if you consider the way one piece of technology has changed the way we gather information in our every day lives — the Internet. Prior to the ubiquity of the World Wide Web, we got most of our news and current events information from mainstream newspapers, magazines, and television and radio programs that were pretty limited in their scope. Since most of these news sources depend on advertiser funding, the information they present typically represent the views of the majority, lest they offend their audiences and advertisers pull their funding. Now we live in a much more information rich society. The advent of 24-hour cable news in the 1980s marked the beginning of the Information Age, but things really exploded when broadband Internet access made it so that anyone with an Internet connection and computer could start their own news media outlet and share their views with the world, covering the news s/he viewed as the most important. This has had a profound impact on the way news is delivered, as Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen points out here:

“The practice of gathering all sides of an issue, and keeping an editorial voice out of it is still relevant for some, but the broad journalism opportunity includes many variations of subjectivity. … the objective approach is only one way to tell stories and get at truth. Many stories don’t have ‘two sides.’ Indeed, presenting an event or an issue with a point of view can have even more impact, and reach an audience otherwise left out of the conversation.”

So what does this have to do with how we leverage technology in the classroom? Keeping Mr Andreessen’s words in mind, isn’t it more important than ever for us to teach our students how to make sense of the world around them? How to navigate the streams of information coming at them through social media? How to question the “variations of subjectivity” they see in a digital and cable news environment? And isn’t the ability to do so what we mean when we talk about the 21st Century Capacities of Synthesizing and Analyzing? I believe the answer to all the questions above is a resounding YES, and here’s what a learning experience that leverages technology and the Web might look like for our students…

For all learners, controversy = engagement, so I suggest finding articles on the Web that speak to one of the most pressing and controversial issues of our time, like climate change, income inequality, money in politics, digital surveillance by government agencies as a way of combating terrorism, or matters of race in America. Given recent events in which unarmed black men were killed by white police officers, let’s use this as an example. A social studies teacher might have students analyze the way white folks and black folks experience and view law enforcement by reading and viewing a series of articles and news clips. After establishing a common understanding of the events surrounding the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the subsequent protests by reading/viewing more objective mainstream news clips, students could then start to process the many variations of subjectivity we’ve been seeing on the Web. This could include a popular post in defense of police officers that’s been making the rounds on social media…

Fb post

Then they could get a different perspective from an article from Alternet.org titled “Most White People in America Are Completely Oblivious” before moving on to this one from FoxNews. Or how about viewing related news segments that express very different perspectives on the issue from Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart? Perhaps a final performance task for this kind of learning unit could be a class debate on white privilege in America à la Stewart/O’Reilly.

The point is, we need to get our students in the habit of mind of questioning all the subjective viewpoints they will encounter on the Web. And we need to design learning experiences that will make them more adept at synthesizing all these viewpoints and pieces of information, and that call on them to ask their own questions to research, so that they can get to some semblance of the truth.

At this point you may be thinking, Ok, but does this really redefine learning tasks through technology? I mean, teachers have been asking their students to think critically about various perspectives since before the Internet existed. While this is true, I think it’s important to note that the technology in this case, the Internet, has redefined how we receive our information. Moreover, there are online tools we can leverage to gather digital information and help us process it better than before. One such tool for which I’m in the process of setting up accounts for Madison teachers and students is Diigo. It’s essentially an online bookmarking tool that allows students to save, highlight, and annotate any article on the Web, and it has some great collaborative features, too. In short, it allows for the creation of the kinds of tasks that were previously inconceivable without it.

For my elementary and lower middle school readers who often struggle to find appropriate online content for their developing young readers and thinkers, and are right now questioning how relevant this post is to them, I’d like to share an excellent tool that Brown Middle School principal Julie Phelps recently turned me on to called Newsela — a website that contains news and current events articles that can all be customized to five different lexile reading levels. So, yes, even elementary students can process current events like the Brown/Garner decisions by reading articles like this one.

This is just one example of how Web-based technologies have the potential to transform and redefine learning, and I’m sure many of you have designed similar experiences for your students. Please help inspire your colleagues by sharing them in the comments section below!

Helping Students Manage Their Digital Lives

Source: http://www.avatargeneration.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/studying-mobile.jpg

Now that we live in a world where much of the educational content we and our students access, consume, and create is digital, we are increasingly accessing this content on the same devices we use for entertainment and to make social connections.  These devices can be used to enlighten us intellectually,  enrich our lives socially, or to simply entertain us with games and other forms of media. While these mobile learning devices allow us to do school and homework whenever, wherever, what happens when the more social aspects of these devices present distractions and get in the way of learning? As this article on Edutopia points out, all too often our students multitask, jumping from their school work to the hard-to-resist temptation of social media–a practice that has been scientifically proven to negatively impact learning. Is it up to us, as educators, to teach kids to delay gratification on their mobile devices? Would this fall under the 21st Century Capacity of Self-Direction? After reading the article, I would argue, yes, on both counts. Check out the Edutopia link above to see what we can do to help our students manage their digital lives.

Is Listening to Music Helpful or Harmful to the Learning Process?

Image source: http://herrickshighlander.com/features/2013/02/01/listening-to-music-while-studying/#prettyPhoto/0/

Those who know me well know what an important role music plays in my life. I spend a good deal of my free time curating and promoting music from artists from around the globe through the boutique record label I co-founded several years ago.  I love surrounding myself with music whenever possible, so it was with a heavy heart that I read this article from Edutopia about a 2010 study that shows listening to music while engaging in certain cognitive tasks can be disruptive to the learning process. While working on my 6th year degree, I sometimes listened to music while completing assignments, but an honest self-assessment supports the evidence: I probably could have completed that work more efficiently had I surrounded myself with more silence, especially when it came to reading and processing new information.

Now that our students are coming to school with smartphones and other mobile learning devices that double as music players, it seems that teachers should be thoughtful about when we allow students to listen to music during the school day and when we discourage it. Some may believe that we should never allow students to plug in their headphones during the school day as it’s too much of a distraction, but this would ignore the research that shows listening to preferred music prior to engaging in a learning task can actually improve performance.  Based on the study linked above, one could argue that certain kinds of music have no impact on learning. One example that comes to mind are the instrumental drone-based compositions on the new Tim Hecker album that’s showing up on a lot of year-end best-of-2013 lists.

So does it depend on the kind of music students listen to while working? What about the complexity of the learning task? What about the age of the student? Study halls and media centers would be a lot easier to manage if students were listening to music instead of distracting each other from their work…but is the music, in this scenario, just a different kind of distraction? It seems there’s no easy answer when it comes to listening to music while learning. But based on the study cited in the article at the link above, it seems we should at least educate our students about the impact music can have on learning.

After reading the article at the link above, what are your thoughts about music and cognition regarding students? How about as a teacher? Do you feel you work better while listening to music, or is it too distracting? Do you listen to music while planning lessons or grading student work even though you know it slows you down simply because it makes the work more enjoyable? I’m also interested in ways teachers incorporate music into learning activities and assessments. Please leave a comment below.

For Teens, Facebook is Passé

NPR’s All Things Considered sat down with a group of teens to learn more about their social media habits. With all the new social networking apps that have hit the market in the past couple years, their digital lives are probably more complicated than anyone over 25 might have guessed. To learn about which apps they use for different specific purposes and why, listen below or click here if you are on a mobile device.

Does Technology Foster More Active Learning, or More Shallow Learning?

As you all know, I’m a big proponent of the use of mobile technologies in our classrooms. In previous posts I’ve blogged about the benefits of BYOD and posted a research paper I wrote about mobile devices as vital learning tools. This article from theJournal discusses how today’s mobile technologies are “creating today’s active learners” who crave immediate access to educational content and timely feedback from teachers and peers. The author makes some valid points about meeting today’s “digital natives” on their turf. But then I came across this video on UpWorthy

…and it got me thinking: Are mobile technologies creating more active learners, or more distracted learners? And if this important distinction hangs in the balance, what can we, as educators, do to determine the answer to this question?

I know from first-hand experience that the narrators of this video are right when they say that the Internet creates a “perpetual state of distraction” that “crowds out the more contemplative, calmer modes of thinking.” To illustrate, just last week I was enjoying a book talk at Central Office with author Allison Zmuda while participating in a live chat of the event on Twitter. There I was doing my best to multitask, listening closely while tapping out some of the key concepts on my phone’s Twitter app, when a text message notification appeared on my screen. It was from my brother. The notification displayed a thumbnail preview of a photo of my nephew grinning widely, holding a baseball in his hand as if it were some lost treasure, and a truncated version of the text that let me know he had just hit his first home run. Proud uncle that I am, I just had to read the full text. Before I knew it, I had lost one of the key concepts Ms. Zmuda was explaining. My attention was divided, and thus, my learning interrupted. I’ve seen this happen with students, too. Once, while helping one of Luke Arsenault’s Video Production students with the attention-demanding task of planning her PSA on digital citizenship, a text message notification appeared on her smartphone that sat on the desk between us (students were instructed to use their mobile devices to brainstorm on their group’s online discussion board). I commended her for not becoming distracted by her phone, but there is no doubt in my mind that, had I not been sitting right there with her, she would have picked up the phone, totally losing her train of thought in the process.

Yes, thanks to mobile technologies, the Internet has the potential to constantly divide our attention and puts at risk our ability to think conceptually, critically, and creatively–the very modes of thinking we know are so vital for our students to develop. But the Internet is such an information and idea-rich place! Without it, I would never have come across the article or the video that prompted this blog post and challenged me to grapple with and synthesize these two pieces of information that seem to be at odds with each other. And without the Internet, I wouldn’t be able to share them with such ease, and collaborate with you on trying to find a solution to the problem this information presents. Thanks to the Internet, I am engaged in a cognitively complex task that calls on my ability to ask tough questions, think critically, and attempt to solve this problem of how to harness the power of mobile technologies to foster deep learning, not shallow, distracted learning. Moreover, thanks to the Internet, I am not alone in finding a solution ( I hope). We can work on this together.

I have some ideas that begin with an open discussion among students and staff about how to manage our digital/academic lives and control the notification settings on our smart devices. But I need your help. You’re the ones in the trenches, day-in, day-out. Share your experiences. What ideas do you have about how we can utilize the power of mobile devices to produce deep thinkers, not distracted, superficial ones.

Please leave your comments below.

Addendum: More vital reading on the effects new technologies can have on learning, with a focus on multitasking while learning: http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/05/how-does-multitasking-change-the-way-kids-learn/