We are a community of smart, strongly-opinionated folks that care deeply about the wellbeing of the youth in our care. This comes out in all sorts of conversations, but the impact and integration of digital technology is certainly one of them.
This year in our curriculum review we are zooming in on math, fitness, and (the very cross-disciplinary) tech integration, and although we’ve only had one meeting so far, it is clear to me we have an incredible array of smart people to do the work. Here are what some folks at our first meeting put in their pre-meeting survey:
- I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I hope that we will be able to set up a curriculum or guidelines for how tech skills will be taught AND come up with a way to catch up the students who might have missed out on the instruction of tech skills. In other words, I hope we can establish a plan for the future and a remediation plan for the kids we currently teach
- I hope that we will look at long term studies, such as Growing Up Digitally, UNESCO’s report on tech in education, recommendations from the Surgeon General, American Academies on Pediatrics, Optometry and other entities to guide our decisions. We have to remember that the companies who produce these digital products need marketshare and profit and if we are just guided by what’s new, cool, and useful according to Google, Meta, etc….instead of waiting for actual research and recommendations by professionals who have the best interest of children in mind, then we might wind up wasting a good bit of resources on things which are actually doing more harm than good.
- For years, we’ve had these conversations. Rather than spending more time debating the best approach here, I would love to see us find a way to measure student tech skills in a way like we did math facts/fluency. If we focused on that as a next step, we could have some concrete data that help us determine if we need to have more stand-alone tech classes or focus on teacher training/tech integration. I think it’s time to just answer the question with data: “Are students equipped,” and this group can decide what we mean by equipped…as digital citizens, equipped with navigating things online safely, equipped with typing skills versus this holding them back in class, etc. It’s more complex to measure than math facts, but we can do it!
We are eager to roll up our sleeves and dive more deeply into this work for meeting later this week, and we will most certainly be asking for more voices and input from faculty, admin, and students as we continue to articulate our school-wide vision in this arena. We have lots of goals in this process, and below you can see what our group voted as either high priority or priority.
| GOAL | VOTES |
| Students need to understand the impact of screens on the brain. | 8 |
| Students need to understand their digital footprint and digital citizenship. | 8 |
| Students need help critically analyzing the information they encounter online. | 8 |
| We need to reduce the amount of time students are on screens during the school day. | 8 |
| Students need better AI Literacy and/or discussions about ethical questions around the use of tech like ChatGPT. | 7 |
| We need to address students’ use of tech in relation to the honor code in Middle/Upper School | 7 |
| Students need to see how technologies are actually used by professionals in various careers. | 7 |
| Students need better keyboarding skills by the time they reach middle school | 6 |
| Students need more familiarity with google suite products. | 6 |
| Students need help creating digital compositions (e.g. slideshows, videos, etc.) | 6 |
| Students need to develop “maker” dispositions (e.g. the ability to contribute, imagine, and create; not passively consume content) | 5 |
| Faculty need training on technology so they can model good uses. | 4 |
| We need more stand-alone tech classes. | 4 |
| Admin need to more clearly set guidelines for when students should be introduced to which technology. | 4 |
| Faculty need to better-integrate tech into their classes. | 3 |
As I worked on these various meeting agendas (constructing a meeting feels very much akin to lesson planning for me) I couldn’t help but think back to my graduate work. (As an aside: In case you aren’t convinced by my blog about how I can’t read small text anymore, let me give you another example of my “I’m not as young as I used to be” status. My dissertation in grad school used the word “new media” in the title.) In my year-long study (circa 2011-2012) I worked with a high school English teacher and her three classes to make sense of the ways that integrating “new media platforms” into her traditional curricula shifted youth’s engagement for better or for worse. We did cutting-edge things like having kids tweet in character, blog regularly (duh of course), create videos, make digital comics, and utilize a classroom website mimicking social media to chat about books. I’d roll my eyes at grad-student-Julie, except I was hyperaware at the time that what I was doing was less about technology and more about the complex decisions we make constantly when designing for learning. Here’s a section in my preface I entitled “This Work Matters, and Here’s Why”.
Let me be very clear. This dissertation is not about blogging. It is not about Twitter. It is not about Facebook, or Go Animate, or Ning, or iMovie, Pinterest, Poll Everywhere, or Power Point, or photography. It’s not about those things, because “those things” will quickly become obsolete. The platforms and tools that put the “new” in “new media” will shift and fade and merge and completely disappear from cultural memory. But it’s not even about new media. This dissertation is about what happens when good teachers try to make changes in the classroom, and they find themselves pushed up against the wall by their own ideologies, the school institution, the expectations of students and parents, their own understandings of what counts as legitimate learning. This dissertation is about what happens when students, with a million other more important things going on, are positioned to participate in English class in different ways than they are used to. This is about the millions of tiny decisions practicing teachers make every day, sometimes calculated and sometimes not. This is about the variety of ways high school students take up teacher invitations in English class, and the way they creatively, tactically rework them. This is about the ways that teachers and students and collide as they make choices in classroom spaces. New media may be the frame. But it is not the story.
In some ways, 2024 is a very different frame to talk about digital tech than 2013 when I typed those words. We know more now about the physiological and psychological impacts of social media and over-screen-use than we did then. We underwent a global pandemic which forced us to reckon more honestly with the limitations (and affordances) of all the devices. Those of us that believe deeply in writing-as-thinking are forced to confront the ways that generative AI is colliding with our worlds. But, at its heart, whether we call it “technology” or “screen use” or “new media,” this is a story about tools intersecting with classroom spaces, youths’ purposes intersecting with educators’ purposes, and what we believe schooling is actually for.
I look forward to the conversation continuing.