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Avoiding the screen savers disease
Jamie McKenzie talks about keeping your focus on the students when technology planning. That means investing in staff development so that your computers don't go to waste. By Melissa Burgos Brown SCR*TEC I think the main thing is that they need to keep remembering that this is about children and it's about learning and questions . . . . The reason we invest in a network is to bring rich information into the classroom, but it only makes sense to have rich information in the classroom if you're going to let kids ask questions and explore questions. If that isn't part of your classroom you could save a whole lot of money. --Jamie McKenzie |
 amie McKenzie, editor of From Now On: the educational technology journal and
independent technology consultant, has spent the last three decades working in
the education field. He has served as a superintendent, principal, professor, and
director of libraries, media, and technology. He currently works as an independent
consultant presenting keynote speeches at national conferences, providing staff
development workshops to school districts and educational organizations, and
helping educational organizations and school districts to stay focused on student
learning when developing their technology plans.In this interview, he talks about the importance of staff development and student-centered technology plans when integrating technology into a school district's curriculum. |
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I know that you have degrees in a variety of subjects; political science,
literature, social studies; but no particular concentration in technology. So how
did you get interested in technology in education? Well, I got interested actually originally in the early 70s working off of a mainframe looking at simulation and thinking about how kids would be able to make decisions as if they were participating in history. So I saw the potential, since I was doing a lot of classroom simulations, that maybe technology would make that more realistic, because it would make it possible to actually play out the odds of various outcomes and so forth. So that was my first exposure, and then later on, I got involved as an elementary principal. I was frankly concerned that the technologists would do things with computers that would be unhealthy for children and would actually reduce the quality of education. So a lot of my early involvement was in order to try and protect values which I thought were threatened by new technologies and which I continue to feel are threatened by bad uses of technology. I've for a long time been a critic of most of what schools have done with computers, because I think they've been a waste of money and a waste of time. |
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I noticed that in your consulting services, as part of Technology Planning, you
help schools make the best choices when choosing hardware for their schools. What
are common mistakes that you see school districts make when they receive funds
for the hardware yet make changes that have little impact on the quality of
education in their districts? Well the most common mistake is that they try to use the computer as a teacher rather than as a tool. And I've seen very little evidence that the billions of dollars invested using the computer as a teacher has actually contributed to student performance. What seems to be a more valuable investment is the investment in staff development so that teachers would use new technologies with kids as powerful tools for research and problem solving and investigations. And that they would do that in a way that mirrored what the students would end up doing in the workplace. We'd see adult writers and communicators and problem solvers in the workplace and we'd try to create similar challenges for students in schools so that they are prepared for their future. Unfortunately I see a huge bandwagon going on right now where people are investing millions of dollars in networks with very little sense of purpose, other than that they want to be modern and 'with it' and cool. |
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There's a lot of cutting-edge hardware and people want it, to have the latest
hardware, but not always with the best interests of the students in mind. Well what I'm concerned about is that they spend most of their money on their network and their hardware and spend very little money on staff development. The state of Illinois now requires that 25 percent of all technology planning money goes into staff development which I think is a good strategy. Most places spend almost nothing on staff development and they wake up with what I call the "screen saver's disease" which is: they have a bunch of computers sitting around that aren't used. So without that very large investment in staff development there's a danger that it just won't get used. |
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In your experience working with teachers, do you find
that, as a whole, most teachers have a positive outlook about integrating
technology in education or are many teachers wary of these big changes? I think there's a real mixture of attitudes, because most of them don't have real deep access yet. So most of the time the people I'm working with tend to be the pioneers and they usually have a really positive attitude and are really eager to get it. But they don't have it yet, in any real depth. So they haven't seen the negatives or the downside of having a network that doesn't have good information on it. And what's happening in a lot of places is that there's a lot of money spent on the network, but then, when they open up the network there's not much on it other than the free Internet. And teachers very rapidly become frustrated with the free Internet and what a district has to do is invest in a lot of periodical collections and other products that they put on their network, which means that you can bring rich, reliable, professional information to the desktop instead of relying on the free Internet which is often unreliable, badly organized, and a time waster. So, what's interesting is that there's a lot of enthusiasm out there, and the enthusiasm tends to drop rapidly after they get robust access to the Internet and see what its weaknesses are. But until you have a lot of access, you don't encounter its weaknesses. |
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"The biggest single mistake that school
districts make is they'll offer classes in Netscape or the Internet and what they
ought to be doing is offering classes in information literacy and research and
problem solving."
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You conduct many educational technology workshops across the country, can you
talk about some of the workshops that teachers and administrators just beginning
with technology should go to, because many districts don't have a professional
development program in place? Well, the most important thing is to make sure that the workshops aren't in applications but are about learning. The biggest single mistake that school districts make is they'll offer classes in Netscape or the Internet and what they ought to be doing is offering classes in information literacy and research and problem solving. And then, teaching the applications secondarily in service of those learning goals. We've spent 20 years now trying to teach people how to use technology in classrooms and we keep making the same mistakes which is that we teach them the software, but we don't teach them how to use it in their classes. Then we wonder why it doesn't get in the classes. |
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Now, let's talk about From Now On, your electronic newletter. It provides dozens
of services and resources for teachers and administrators regarding technology in
education. It's been around for six years and really the technology has become
really prominent in the last couple of years. Can you talk about what gave you
the idea to begin From Now On? Well actually, I was the superintendent of schools back in the late 80s and I decided I didn't want to do that anymore, so I started my own speaking and consulting business back in the late 80s. Then one day I was playing around with Applelink and found out by accident, by doing a search for somebody's address, that if you typed in a K, all of the sudden, I had all 2,400 school addresses come back at me, because every school address, at that time, they only had like the leading school districts in the country for technology on the Applelink network, but they all had like a K and then four digits. So I was in this long scrolling list and I realized 'Gee maybe there's some way I could send an e-mail message to all 2,400.' So I played around a little bit more and figured out that, if I grouped them in groups of 50, I could send a message to all 2,400 school districts and I just got the idea of having a monthly technology journal and encouraging other people to submit articles and so forth. And, at that time, it cost me about $300 a week to send it to 2,400 school districts and if I had tried to print and mail something it would have been a fortune! So I thought that was kind of fun and it led to a lot of neat experiences and I just kept doing it even after I came to to Bellingham and was director of libraries and technology there for four years, just, you know, left in June. But when I started being more involved on the Internet, I was posting articles from From Now On on listservs and somebody from Columbia asked if they could put one on their Web site, a copy of "Raising the Net" on their Web site and it happened to be the ILT [Institute of Learning Technologies] site at Columbia and Bram Moreinis was putting it up and I thought, well I could do that and I was just starting to do the Bellingham Web site for the school district. So I decided to post all of the succeeding issues on a Web site and, of course, when I first started I thought I'd just put the new issues on but then I thought, 'Well, it wouldn't be that much work to take the old issues and put them on.' I think it's been really fun seeing what it's turned into because I really didn't know what it was when I started. I just thought it'd be a place where I'd put the monthly issue and it's turned into a lot more than that. And it's been really gratifying because about a third of the people who visit are from outside of North America and I get lots of really interesting e-mail and a lot of really fun and interesting opportunities. I'm going to Australia in May for two weeks to speak to librarian groups all across Australia. |
 Educators team up with McKenzie during technology workshop. |
And this came about through the Web site? All because of the Web site. What happens is that when you write an article and you put it up on the Web, it has a life of its own. And if it has any value, it floats and it travels and people send it to their friends and they send it to their friends and somebody writes me a note and asks to re-publish it in Malaysia for some newsletter and it's just really exciting because it just has it's own life. It's sort of like taking some really neat balloon and loading with a fun message and sending it out into the sky and finding out it dropped 20 thousand miles away. Well you know, a lot of people say that the best way to begin incorporating technology into your schools is with e-mail. How do you feel about that? The one thing I'll say about that is that you don't necessarily see any additional pay off though. I've seen a whole lot of people in Bellingham pick up the e-mail skill and become very good at communicating with each other but not necessarily turn around and turn it into things that would actually benefit children. It becomes an adult communication medium, they use it to chat with their son or daughter in school, with each other, but they don't necessarily make the move toward having the kids do research with other kids in other countries and share data and all that kind of stuff. So I've found that it's fairly typical that, when people say that 'you need to buy every teacher a laptop and if you buy them a laptop and let them take it home then they'll turn around and do all sorts of cool stuff with kids.' It just doesn't happen automatically, they may become very skilled with the computer, but they may not necessarily turn around and make the leap into actually changing what they do in the classroom. It's a good strategy to pursue but people have to make sure they keep the focus on classroom applications along with those types of strategies, making sure that they are helping people see what they ought to be doing with kids. |
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Has your experiences as Director of Libraries, Media, and Technology in
Bellingham Schools caused you to make any major changes or additions to your
online newsletter as a result of seeing greater need? Well basically a lot of what was going on with my journal is I was reporting on what worked or didn't work as I was a director of libraries media and technology and I was developing staff development experiences for teachers in Bellingham and so forth. The reason I took the job in Bellingham was that they had a really good technology plan that focused on student learning and they had a commitment to staff development. So I was essentially building and then testing models for what might work and what wouldn't work. And you look at your staff and you see a mixture of people ranging from pioneers to sages and you say 'okay, what strategy would work with each category of teacher?' To some extent it's a trial and error process because nobody's really sure and there haven't been a lot of people that have been successful with this. So you work with a team of inventive people and you come up with this list of strategies and then you try them and some of them work and some of them don't work. So a lot of what I was doing with From Now On was reporting the failures and the successes because people have to know what doesn't work as well as knowing what is successful. Part of it is that it's always unique to the school district that you work in and you can learn something from the successes and failures of other people, but basically it's a process of customizing to fit your particular group of people and your particular culture and your particular challenge. You have to adjust what other people have done to fit your local context. |
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That makes a lot of sense. Most people just want to buy a package, you know. That's what's scary about technology. Part of why companies are very successful in selling packages to schools, many of which I don't approve of or agree with as being valuable, is that people are scared of technology and don't feel very knowledgeable, and when the sales people come along with these package deals, part of their sales strategy is to say ' look, you don't have to know anything. We'll do it all for you. Buy our package, install it, just bring the kids down once a week or three times a week and have them sit in the lab, and it'll all be taken care of for you.' It's a very expensive and high dependency model which relieves those people of any real responsibility for figuring it out. But it doesn't work. It's expensive and it doesn't work. Most of these are programs that are aimed at building basic skills and all that kind of stuff and I think, in many places that have tried that, they end up getting rid of it and trying something else. |
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So where do you suggest that school districts that receive new grants should
begin their research on doing it right? Should they look for a consultant such as
yourself or . . . ? Well consultants are really dangerous, because most of them have conflicts of interest relationships with vendors. I think the best strategy is that they should be thinking about how to develop inside talent and knowledge as one of their first strategies and they need to invest money in that. They need to identify three or four really thoughtful librarians and teachers with the most promise and then they need to pour a lot of money into making sure those people visit lots of places that have had some success. You've got to have people inside who know how to question the outsiders. You've got to think of the outsiders as wolves and think of the school district as a chicken house because there is a tremendous amount of manipulating and marketing going on. So you have to have people inside who, aren't necessarily experts, but at least know how to ask the right questions. And then, if they hire consultants, they need to make sure that they hire, and then balance consultants against each other . . . So it pays to have a consultant or two that are brought in and told 'look all we want you for is for like a second or third opinion,' sort of like a medical model where you go to a second or third doctor and you just want to kind of check on the advice you're getting from the first doctor . . . At some point in time the understanding and the energy has to come from within. The strongest strategy is to invest powerfully for your best people on the inside and make sure there's a balance between educators and systems people because in a lot of places the systems people end up having too much control and everybody else is scared of computers. So the systems people end up putting something like three computers in every classroom, which is really stupid, but it makes sense from a network point of view if you want to have nice smooth distribution of computers but it's really a bad model for learning. So if you have the design process controlled by librarians and teachers who are well-informed, they're going to say 'well, what do we want to use this technology for?' and then, after they've defined what their purpose is, then they'll start to say, 'well this is what the network would have to be able to do and this is where we'll have to put the computers where they would do the most good.' The point is that the design should be based on educational purpose not on some computer engineer's notion of a good network. |
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"... it only makes sense to have rich information in the classroom if you're going to let kids
ask questions and explore questions."
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So that is your main focus. Right, we've got to remember that we're spending $20 million, not so we can say 'look at the nice network we have,' but so kids and teachers will actually use it to learn. Well is there anything else you'd like to say to our readers? Well no, I think the main thing is that they need to keep remembering that this is about children and it's about learning and questions . . . The reason we invest in a network is to bring rich information into the classroom, but it only makes sense to have rich information in the classroom if you're going to let kids ask questions and explore questions. If that isn't part of your classroom you could save a whole lot of money. |
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