Make New Friends, but Keep the Old

While at an interview this last week I was given the question, "What are some ideas you have to help teachers develop their expertise in the area of technology, especially those teachers hesitant to use technology?" You've all heard these layered questions before. I jumped in with the answer that so few technology trainers have really emphasized. Just do what you have been doing.
Teachers from my generation that went to teachers college in the 80's learned techniques for group work called Cooperative Learning (thats the Johnson and Johnson style). We have been asking students to "think, pair, share" or move to the Four Corners of the room for 2 decades. Masters at cooperative lesson design took hours to create an effective cooperative project because in order to be effective the design needed group work as well as individual accountability. As every school child knows, it's that individual accountability part that didn't work. There was always one gullible student doing the bulk of the work during any given project. Trust me, even my boys today still complain about this.

Now we have technology and we call it collaboration. The same concepts apply; we want students to cooperate to create a finished product, solution, presentation, wiki etc...However, the individual accountability part is much easier to document. Every wiki I've worked with gives time stamps for each user and logs all their edits. MS Office allows for multiple editors. All electronic files have authors and date last modified.  This is a record of individual work (or not as the case may be.) To further the role of cooperation, the web is an authentic world in which to publish, and continue to edit. A webpage may now exist longer than just a semester. What was once an assignment in class to be tossed out at the end of the school year with all the other posters, papers, and models, continues on for the next school year and the next. Not only are students able to collaborate with a group within their class, but they can collaborate with anyone and even break out of the time constraint so that a 3rd grade project may be a continuous entity into the future and gather more collaborators.
This is daunting to teachers but they see clearly the advantages for themselves. Progress reports are merely snapshots of the screen at any given time. Was a student contributing or causing a disruption? I believe that type of documentation is vital when teachers are required to justify every grade and instructional decision.

It is important that I refer back to my original answer to the interviewer. Just do what you have been doing. There are so many wonderful teachers with skills that outweigh anything a computer or iTouch app can do. They have a love for students and a concern. The machines can't do that. As the trainers leap forward with the latest trends like virtual worlds, distance education and more detached teaching, please don't change it all. There is still a place for a loving instructor and teachers need to be reminded we are not leaving that aspect behind.

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