Teachers everywhere are gearing up for the start of the new school year. Judging from the tweets I’m seeing from all the history teachers I follow on Twitter, technology is a big concern. What tools should we incorporate into the classroom? How do we engage students in Web-based research? How do we interact with other educators around the globe and learn from what they are doing? From Google Docs to Web-based syllabi to Twitter and Facebook, educators are spending significant time and energy on finding ways to transform the classroom experience for their students and for themselves. Of course, I recognize that teachers who use Twitter are by default likely to be the most interested in using technology to further classroom instruction (”tech ed”). Still, it’s clear that these educators are the pioneers in a trend that is irreversible. The strategies that they develop in tech ed will eventually be adopted by virtually all teachers everwhere. Technology is only going to be more ubiquitous in our lives as time goes on, and–just as crucial–students will increasingly demand an educational experience that is infused with technological tools and possibilities.
Because we are in the midst of reimagining how we deliver our own content to teachers and students via the Web (I’m referring to the site redesign that is in progress for MilestoneDocuments.com, and the iPhone apps we are developing), I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue. And it seems that everywhere I turn these days, other people are thinking and writing about it as well. The article in this month’s Fast Company magazine about how “edupunks” are reinventing higher education through the use of online learning tools at very low cost has gotten a lot of attention in educational and technology circles. Likewise, history educators far and wide are blogging about how they are using technology (see The History Teacher’s Attic and Thinking in Mind for just 2 examples) in new and innovative ways. As often happens, a few select voices are making an outsized contribution. Witness Russell Tarr, a U.K. educator whose Active History site is innovating with gaming and other social Web tools and who has almost singlehandedly built an international networkof history educators via Twitter. (Just search on the #historyteacher hashtag in Twitter to see what I mean.)
Of course, all the technological bells and whistles mean nothing if student achievement and learning aren’t also being transformed. As the educational consultant Peter Pappas pointed out in this blog post from last month:
“Learning must engage student in rigorous thinking at higher levels of Bloom - analyzing, evaluating and creating.”
Helping students with those very things–analyzing and evaluating primary sources as a way to better understand history–is our entire focus with our Milestone Documents series of reference books and MilestoneDocuments.com. And there is no doubt that in many classrooms around the country, students and educators are engaging with exactly this kind of higher-level learning process. However, far too many classrooms are nowhere near this ideal, either. Recently, managing editor Andrea Betts and I visited an inner-city Dallas high school recently and saw the hallway walls lined with simple posters that the students had created. There were posters about the Constitution, Brown v. Board of Education, and other major primary documents from U.S. history. “This is great to see,” we thought at first. But then Andrea asked the question: “Why are high school students spending their time making posters? Why aren’t they writing lengthy papers (or even short ones, but a lot of them), putting together sophisticated presentations, and the like?” We don’t know that some of this wasn’t happening, but my gut tells me that it wasn’t. I suspect that the “rigorous thinking at higher levels” that Peter Pappas referred to in his blog post was far from the minds of the teachers and administrators at this school. They were probably more focused on keeping kids in school (the dropout rate at the school was above 50%) and imparting some basic level of knowledge hoping that more kids might pass the state exams.
Which brings me back to the use of technology in the classroom. If ever the moment was ripe for a paradigm shift in educational instruction methods–at all levels of learning–it is now. The Internet, social media, and open source tools are indeed revolutionizing entire sectors of society and business (one example: publishing). How do we use them to reinvent history education in particular, and education in general? Is there a way to use them to close the achievement gap for the worst-performing schools and students? And where is the innovation going to come from–will it come from inside the public school system, from teachers, from charter schools, from new forums for online learning?
Certainly I don’t have the answers to these questions. But it’s a hopeful sign to see so many stakeholders thinking about these issues. Our kids deserve a better educational experience than they have been getting.
With the world’s attention focused on Haiti in the wake of the January 12 earthquake, we are making available for a limited period of time an entry from our forthcoming reference set Milestone Documents in World History: “Constitution of Haiti (1801).” This article discusses the history of Haiti, the slave revolt that became a revolution, and the creation of a constitution in 1801 that is a landmark on many levels. Although the constitution didn’t have a long life as a governing document, it was tremendously important, as it “launched the process of overthrowing European colonial rule in the Americas–rule that extended back some three centuries to the decades after Christopher Columbus’s historic voyage to the New World.” Read more.
