Tinkerings

Over the summer I was privileged to attend the Discovery Educator Network’s Leadership Council Symposium at Bentley University in Waltham, MA.  Some of you may remember the short video a few of us produced to highlight the exercise routine of the week….walking 287 stair steps from our dorm to our meeting hall.

One of the highlights of the week was working with Dr. Lodge McCammon of the Friday Institute.  Lodge (as he is affectionately called by all his groupies) is a genius when it comes to using media in the classroom.  He has a wonderful self-effacing sense of humor that turns his apparent geekiness into the King of Cool.

During the half-day we spent with Lodge, he introduced us to the ease with which teachers and students alike can create “paper slide” videos for instruction.  In fact, rather than demonstrate the technique or lecture about it, Lodge made a paper slide video to show us how easy paper slide videos are to make.

As a result, I have decided that the starters for our 6th grade classes in our computer labs will be done this way.  The first six weeks I am creating all of the starter videos, but my goal is to students create them for the last part of the semester.  We will follow the paper slide format Monday through Thursday and then let them type their favorite or best starter into Word as part of Friday’s assignment.

I was surprised at how easy it was to do.  Although we are teaching math skills to 6th graders, our starters are all language arts driven.  As a result, we are asking students to write at least one paragraph at the beginning of class each day.  The first week of videos don’t fully follow our instructions from Lodge, but I’m working up to that.

Typically, his paper slide videos introduce a concept, demonstrate the concept in some form, and then ask a guiding question for the students to work on in order to demonstrate understanding.  My first few videos end more with guiding “instructions” rather than questions.  As the kids get used to doing this form of starter, we will change the construct slightly in order to be more open ended for them.

Here is the video we are using today as we get this process started.

Even before reading Nicholas Carr’s poignant article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the Atlantic, I have been struck with the gnawing realization that we are slowly but surely degrading critical thinking skills through technology.  This is not the fault of schools or parents or even kids.  It is a naturally occurring phenomenon that is both insipid and insidious.

When I was a child in the 60s (born in 1958), technology was pretty limited.  We had 3 channels on the TV (sometimes 4 if you count the local UHF channel), a radio, and a record player.  Yes, those were the days when kids played outside with one another and the ear bud, if thought of at all, was a gnat that flew into your ear canal.

Kids had imaginations.  They thought.  They figured things out.

Think about it in terms of music alone.

When I was young, music was something we heard.  We had to use our minds to imagine what the band looked like.  We made up mini-movies in our heads that went with the lyrics.  Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds had a different video for each mind that hummed it.

Then came the Midnight Special and MTV.  Suddenly, we weren’t forced to make this stuff up any longer.  The band was in our living room in all their sweaty, long-haired, torn-clothes glory.  Video Killed the Radio Star didn’t just kill a star.  It killed our need to imagine a story.  And our brains got stupid.

Today, we have no need to commit facts to our brains.  Let Me Google That For You is not only a modern catch phrase, but a fantastic site to use for those too lazy to even look stuff up for themselves.  6th graders arrive at middle school with few, if any, multiplication facts committed to memory.  Why would they?  They have calculators (or WolframAlpha).  There is no need to remember important dates or historical facts.  Wikipedia stands at the ready.

Henri Nouwen, my 2nd favorite author behind Kurt Vonnegut, Jr (what a combination), wrote that all decisions are laden with life and death.  The key to successful living is to make decisions that contain more life than death.

Technology comes with life and death.  We must integrate technology into the classroom.  It is the future, and the future is now.  We cannot ignore it.  But we must also realize the death that comes with it and be prepared to combat that with every sinew of our educational beings.

We have to find a way to allow the technology to spawn creativity again (see Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on how education is killing creativity).  It is through creativity that critical thinking is born, enhanced, and maintained.

Is Google making us stupid?  Is technology destroying critical thinking?  What do you think?  Leave me a comment.