Insight into Digital Lesson Design from TeachersCount

Thursday, 9/3/2009

In time for Back to School, TeachersCount, one of Walden’s partners, has offered some insight on digital lesson design from one of their esteemed Teacher Bloggers, Daniel Venerables.

TeachersCount’s mission is to raise the status of the teaching profession and provide resources to the education community. Their site features teacher blogs, free resources, lesson plans and classroom ideas, school supply discounts as well as the fantastic “Behind Every Famous Person is a Fabulous Teacher” campaign which pairs well-known individuals like America Ferrera (pictured above) with their favorite teachers. These posters, along with all of the TeachersCount resources are free to educators.

Walden is privileged to have one of TeachersCount’s bloggers, Daniel Venerables, share his observances on the digital classroom. Venerables has been teaching math for 25 years in a wide range of venues: from privileged, high-achieving students in a top-notch private school in Columbia, SC to disadvantaged, at-risk students in two of Charlotte’s toughest high schools. His work as a math content coach and middle school professional development coordinator has allowed him to observe over 1000 different classrooms. His thoughts are quoted below:

Digital Lesson Design

As someone who now works at the district level in professional development, I am fortunate to be sent to many workshops, conferences and trainings that keep me current so that I may best serve the teachers for whom I provide professional development. Recently, I spent two full days in two different trainings, both involving technology. One was on the use of document cameras and wireless digital tablets in lesson design and the other was the first of four full day sessions about digital resources available through Discovery Education (the Discovery Channel people) regarding multimedia lesson design.

In both cases, I left the trainings excitably exhausted by the overwhelming amount I had learned and by the equally overwhelming sense of possibility. It makes me want to jump back into the classroom and try my hand at making creative use of these incredible learning tools. How differently would I teach my AP Calculus class or my class of struggling Algebra 1 repeaters? Let’s face it: kids today live and play in this digital world (even an unexpected number of kids who otherwise live in poverty); they are digital natives. Most of the teachers who teach them, like me, are digital immigrants.

These kids have cognitively developed in this digital world and their brains are wired for it; indeed, physiologically different than ours when we were their age. They are use to processing and multitasking in a highly visual and highly interactive environment. To be sure, they are engaged by it, motivated to navigate in this realm and developmentally programmed to learn easily in it. Even the most recalcitrant student can be turned on by it, and the plethora of good materials out there in this cyberworld is right up their intellectual allies. No teacher’s whiteboard (or even SmartBoard) presentations - no matter how dynamic the teacher may be - can match the effectiveness of the same lesson designed in the multimedia, interactive format.

Sure, it takes money. But not as much as you might think. A decent document camera (aka an “overhead on steroids”) costs as little as $400. Throw in a wireless digital tablet for another $500 (both together still way less expensive than a SmartBoard, but with 80% of the capability).

Our district has signed on with Discovery Education with, I believe, Title I federal funding. Money is not the biggest impediment. Nor is this to say that digital learning should entirely replace face-to-face learning and interaction. Kids still need to learn how to discuss, infer, argue, evidence their positions, work collaboratively with others, and so forth. But teachers need to be willing to change antiquated, inefficient ways of teaching kids. Students are ready and willing to learn, just not the way we’ve insisted on teaching them. Education is changing. As teachers and principals (who no doubt hold the purse strings necessary to advance teachers to the real possibility of digital lesson design), we need to get on the digital education bus, stop clinging to obsolete, ineffective ways of teaching kids, and stop hiding behind excuses of funding and other impediments when our own trepidation and fear is our biggest impediment.

The kids we have today can’t wait until tomorrow, when everybody’s doing it and it becomes - as I know it will - the new status quo.