'Time for a Revolution'

"We're way past reform," said Jeff Piontek, the head of school at the Hawaii Technology Academy, in his closing keynote speech at the ISTE conference in Denver. "It's time for a revolution in education."

The former science educator and head of the state-sponsored charter school spoke to a packed auditorium on the final day of the conference about the importance of following your passion and infusing creativity and innovation into the STEM subjects. In fact, he recommended changing the well-known acronym, which refers to the subjects of science, technology, engineering, and math, to STEAM, the extra "A" referring to the arts, an idea that elicited applause from the audience.

"It's creativity and innovation that's going to drive our economy," said Piontek, criticizing the standardized tests that he said stifled learning and creativity in public schools across the country. Standardized tests "are not a true gauge of student learning," he said. "We need to think about how we actually assess students on a larger scale."

Educators must give students the technological tools and resources they need to become competent global citizens, said Piontek. Teachers must learn to guide students with content and curriculum and trust that the students will know how to use the tools, he said. "When you're in a classroom, you have to know that the culture you're teaching is not your own," he said, referring to the gap between those who have grown up using digital tools and those who have not.

Piontek's comments echoed most of the panelists, speakers, researchers, and educators I heard from here at the ISTE conference this year. Rethinking the way students are taught and assessed, using technology to support learning, and supplying students with the tools and resources they need to learn through real-world projects is a sentiment that prevailed throughout the conference, and one that Piontek encouraged educators to take with them when they return to their schools throughout the country and the world.

NYC iSchool Shares Its Ed-Tech Vision

To break out of "systemic failure," educators must rethink basic assumptions of what schools should look like, said Alisa Berger, a co-principal of the NYC iSchool, a new small high school that opened in New York City in 2008.

The school, which started with a class of 100, incorporates a heavy dose of technology into the classroom, but both Berger and her co-principal Mary Moss emphasized that technology be used as a tool to support teachers and students, rather than the focus of the curriculum. More importantly, technology helps the students and teachers at the iSchool engage in meaningful, interdisciplinary, real-world projects, said Berger and May at a session at the ISTE conference here in Denver.

For example, students at the school used tech tools to engage in conversations with students in London, Afghanistan, and Israel to talk about the September 11 terrorist attacks and their impact on world affairs, said Berger.

That project demonstrates the emphasis on interdisciplinary studies that both Moss and Berger said was a key element of the structuring of the new school. Each class students take fulfills credits in multiple content areas, rather than just one.

Another example Berger mentioned was having students design a green roof for their school. Using environmental science and engineering skills, students created several proposals that they then pitched to companies in order to secure funding for the project. After receiving feedback from the companies, students then came up with a final version.

To keep up with the demands of state standardized tests, students at the NYC iSchool take online classes, which allow them to move at their own pace, spending more time on the concepts they struggle with and allowing them to bypass areas where they are already proficient. That strategy has allowed many of the school's students to pass state exams normally given in 11th and 12th grade, which teachers at the school hope will free up student schedules in their final two years to take classes that they are most interested in.

Finally, encouraging students to take ownership of their learning and reflect on what they're interested in and what learning methods work best for them is a key element to the success of the school, said Moss and Berger. To help create a student-centered environment, each student is assigned an advisor, with whom the student meets at the end of each grading period to discuss his or her performance. In addition, students get new schedules every nine weeks, and they get to choose and rank which courses they'd most like to take. The school provides ample opportunities for feedback and reflection, which help inform students, teachers, and administrators as to what's working and what's not.

Citing the Real Author, Not Mr. Google

Putting its stamp on another hot topic at the ISTE 2010 ed-tech conference in Denver, the International Society for Technology in Education on Wednesday explained an evolving web-literacy curriculum developed with Microsoft and gathered feedback from conference-goers.

Critical Thinking In the Classroom focuses on teaching students to be responsible cyber researchers. The lessons, which can be downloaded for free, are available at three ability levels and are broken into five units: the mechanics of searching, validity and reliability, plagiarism, citing Web sources, and civil discourse.

Chris O'Neal, the ISTE faculty member who collaborated on the curriculum, said the program is aimed at changing the habits of students who have a quick Internet trigger, but not a natural skepticism of what they find on the other end of the search field barrel or an awareness of where it comes from. Some younger students, he said, even think everything they find on a search engine is the search engine's own content.

"We asked [students], 'Would you make life decisions based on the first [Web] page that comes up?'" O'Neal said. "And some kids really said, 'Well, it depends what the question is.' "

The ISTE-Microsoft venture comes at a time when digital responsibility is becoming a topic of national—and federal—discussion. The National Broadband Plan, released in March by the Federal Communications Commission, is calling for increased focus on digital literacy. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education and Karen Cator, its director of education technology, want students to gain a grasp of digital citizenship, the concept of understanding and evaluating your actions as a member of a digital community. The ISTE-Microsoft curriculum scratches the surface of those issues in its civil discourse unit.

"When we posed these questions to a whole bunch of media specialists in the country, that's something that came back," O'Neal said. "Kids have a real hard time being in blogs and being civil. ... They're reading a statement someone says as truth, and getting really, really ticked off about it."

Other organizations are developing curricula that more thoroughly tackle the citizenship issue. Look for a blog post about one of them when the conference disperses and yours truly is back at EdWeek's Bethesda, Md., headquarters.

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