A Curriculum Architect Takes on K-2 Technology: Week 3
The plan for my third lesson is both simple and nerve-wracking. We are using the iPads for the first time, so we need to discuss, model, and practice how we are passing out and collecting the iPads. I’m also demoing a new drawing app for the students: Art Set 4. I plan to use an iPad connected to an LCD projector for the demo, but I’m not sure if all the classrooms have projectors. Since I’m an itinerant technology teacher, I travel from classroom to classroom, relying on whatever I can forage from the land to sustain myself. All I have with me is my trusty iPad cart.
Luckily, all of the classrooms do have projectors. However, in a few of the classrooms, those projectors are rarely used, so I have to spend 5–10 minutes setting them up and moving furniture around. In one classroom, I make a mental note to buy and bring an extension cord with me next time. I’ve also asked teachers to supply me with a list of student numbers, if they have them. Most teachers assign their students numbers for cubbies, spots on the rug for seating, etc. I figure it’ll be easier for everyone if the students are assigned an iPad with the same number that they’re using for everything else. However, I am finding that few of the teachers are very good about responding to my emails (I sent an email out asking about projectors and got maybe one reply). I’m going to have to take care of a lot of logistics on the fly when I would have preferred to prep things more thoroughly ahead of time. This make me very nervous.
We spend around ten minutes passing out the iPads. I assign the students their numbers and call up the 1st- and 2nd-graders in groups of five and the kindergarteners individually. When students receive their iPads, they carry it with two hands back to their desk, where they lay the iPad flat and do not touch it or turn it on. No is allowed to turn on their iPad until all of the iPads have been passed out and I give them the go ahead.
Once every student has an iPad, I teach them how to turn on the iPad and go to the home screen. Then, I teach them how to turn the iPad off. With those basics out of the way, I connect my iPad to the projector and launch Art Set 4. There are only a few things I need to show them. When the app is launched, it will either open to a drawing or to the gallery. If the students find a drawing, I want them to put the drawing away. This seems like an alien concept to the students—they just want to erase and draw on top of any existing drawing. But we talk about what a student should do if they sit down at a table and find another student’s drawing on the table. If that was their drawing, what would they want the student to do with it? Of course, they would want the student to put their drawing aside and get a fresh piece of paper for themselves. So, that’s precisely what we are going to do in Art Set 4. I show them how to put an existing drawing back in the gallery and then how to bring up a fresh piece of paper. This is a critical lesson because up to 16 students share each iPad, everything is stored locally, there are no separate accounts or logins, and most iOS apps are designed for a single user. I need students to recognize that their iPad is a shared resource, and if we are going to work on long-term projects, we have to be able to safely store our work on the iPad without worrying that it’ll be deleted or modified by another student.
Finally, I show the students how to change colors and drawing implements, and how to undo and clear the piece of paper. I really wish that Art Set 4 had an actual eraser tool. I also wish that you could draw shapes. Some of those features are available as an in-app purchase. (Note to app developers, schools can’t buy in-app purchases. If I could have bought Art Set 4 with all features unlocked, I would have, but that wasn’t an option.) The nice thing about Art Set 4 is that, once you have a piece of paper in front of you, there isn’t much a student can do to get in trouble, so I can just turn the students loose.
I give the students time to explore the app as I circulate around the room, answering questions. I model not touching a student’s iPad whenever I help them. If it’s something that I want the student to learn how to do, I guide the student verbally (and by pointing things out), but I leave it to the student to actually interact with the app itself. This is how I would like students to help out other students—not by doing something for them, but by showing them how to do it for themselves.
With ten minutes left in class, I instruct the students on how to put their drawings away, return to the home screen, turn off the iPad, and wait until I call on them to return their iPad to the cart. Many students ask me to show them how to save their drawing, and I assure them that their drawing will be saved when they return it to the gallery.
My observations
Students really enjoyed drawing in Art Set 4. (I keep saying drawing, but it’s more accurate to describe it as a painting app, not a drawing app. We will delve into this distinction once we start to work with an actual drawing app.) Students liked the different tools (pencils, pens, markers, crayons, oil paints, watercolors, etc.). They were also impressed by the ability to mix paints. We talked about how the app was trying imitate real-life, and how painters only purchase small number of paint colors and then mix those colors to get more colors. In some classes, we even discussed the dry tool, which is used to dry paint quickly so it can be painted over without mixing.
Many students were very excited by the idea that they could save a drawing and return to it in a future class. I told them that we were going to be doing that, but that I could not guarantee that these initial drawings would survive because we were still learning to share the iPads. And, indeed, lots of drawings were vandalized. Despite my explicit instructions, students would launch Art Set 4, see a drawing, and then immediately start drawing on top of it. It broke my heart, but I recognized that students didn’t know better. And I don’t mean that these students were too young to know better, I mean that no one had taught them to share on the iPad before. Like I said, students at this age already know better than to draw over someone else’s work—in the real world. But they seem to view the iPad as some kind of free-for-all where there are no rules. Anything that looks touchable is touched, and students gleefully hammer apps and brutally stress test them. On the one hand, you can say that students are just being inquisitive and exploring. And they did discover some cool stuff without me having to show them—such as the ability to rotate and pinch-to-zoom on the paper. But I’d describe much of this exploration as frenzied and out of control. We wouldn’t tolerate this in the physical world (it would not be cute for kids to walk into a random room and start pulling things out of drawers and off shelves, creating a huge mess and breaking things in the process), and this culture has to change if we hope to work on long-term projects. With this level of disrespect toward tools and other student’s work, I would have to treat student work as transient.
However, the main thing to keep in mind is that this existing attitude toward technology is a culture that we perpetuate. When kids come to school, they learn that there are areas of the room that are off limits to them: the teacher’s desk, the supply closet, and other student’s desks and cubbies. We would have to change how we do everything if we had to lock things down. But we don’t have to because kids quickly learn to respect the classroom and other people’s things. We should be teaching these same lessons when it comes to digital spaces, like the iPad, but we’re not. Instead, we tend to nod approvingly when kids hammer on an app, trying to break it, if they can. I see that as profoundly disrespectful. I would never abuse my tools in that way, and I want students to feel the same way. More on this next week.
In my lesson plan, I estimated that students would have 10–15 minutes to draw anything they want on the iPad—depending on how quickly we could pass out the iPads and go over Art Set 4. In practice, some classes had over 20 minutes to draw, but many other classes had less than one minute. And those classes only had that minute because I ended up condensing my demo. It was a little disheartening to see how unruly some of the classes were. I had to keep signaling for their attention and waiting, sometimes for every sentence. I know that students at that age have short attention spans and can’t sit still for long, but my demo literally took less than five minutes if I didn’t have to wait for students to pay attention or interrupt myself because a student decided to fire up Block Craft 3D. Again, I don’t see this as poor impulse control, but as a symptom of our messed up technology culture.
Mapping out a 3-year curriculum
So far, I’ve been designing the same basic curriculum for my kindergarteners, 1st-graders, and 2nd-graders. I described the learning progression I’ve been working on in my last post. However, now that I’m getting to know the students better, I’m starting to differentiate more and I’m beginning to think about how to structure the curriculum as a 3-year spiral. My gut is telling me to focus more on painting and drawing in kindergarten, more on drawing and animated flip books in 1st-grade, and more on stop-motion animation in 2nd-grade. If I try to teach the kindergarteners stop-motion animation this year, we’ll have to rush through painting and drawing to do it. I’d really like to slow things down so kids can go deeper into these apps and develop their skills. At the same, we will probably do stop-motion in animation in kindergarten, both because I talked about doing it and because I’m always curious to learn what kids can do. It’s common to underestimate kids, and if kindergarteners can do animated flip books and stop-motion animation (and understand it on a deep level), then I’d like to know that. I might still pull back in the future, but I’d do it not because I don’t think kids can handle more advanced concepts, but because I also value painting and drawing—and I don’t want to rush through those things. After all, we can just as easily go deep with painting and drawing if we have the time.
Brainstorming engineering design projects
Besides making stuff with tools (and learning how those tools work and how to use them safely and responsibly), I also want students to do at least one online research project and one engineering design project. Remember, the technology class doesn’t just cover the digital literacy and computer science standards; it also covers the technology/engineering standards.
Originally, I thought we might spend a chunk of time using measuring tools. This would enable us to collect, analyze, and represent data—and build our own tools. When I taught science, students had a lot of fun and learned a lot building single-beam balances. I envisioned some kind of ongoing project where the students would take weekly measurements. My friend Daniel has told me about his experiences operating a weather station. I’ve often thought about doing some kind of long-term survey of the biome surrounding a school. We could photograph and catalog the local flora and fauna, measure the height of plants over time, etc. I thought it might be fun to just try to map the land around the school to scale. Then, toward the end of the school year, we would do some kind of engineering design project (bridge building, etc.).
However, as much as I want to spend time on non-digital tools to provide students with a broader understanding of technology, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get those projects off the ground. Some of it is the time I’ll need for planning, but it’s also material costs. A large part of a school’s budget is allocated and spent over the summer. I wasn’t hired until after Labor Day. I don’t have any supplies or a budget to spend. Let’s say I could round up $2000 from somewhere (say, the PTA), that’s only $5 per student. One of my complaints about existing engineering design projects is that they skimp on the revisions students can do. If we did bridge building, could students build bridges for less than $2? That would only enable them to build 2.5 bridges! Another issue is teaching sixteen classes in parallel with no classroom. If I see a class on Mondays and they are doing an engineering design project for four weeks, where do I store their prototypes? Even if I stagger my classes so only a few of them are doing the project at the same time, I’d still have to store close to a hundred prototypes somewhere.
Thinking it might be better to defer the engineering design project and/or the measurement project to next year, when I could plan and purchase supplies over the summer, I started brainstorming alternatives. The first idea was to do a design thinking project based on rule-making. Designing and following rules is a big part of a primary school student’s life. We can think of a rule as a non-tangible tool that was designed to solve a problem. For example, why do we raise our hands when we have something to say to the teacher? Well, what would happen if everyone just blurted things out all the time? The rule about raising your hand was designed so we can all be heard. What if students could re-design some of the existing rules or come up with new rules for problems that haven’t been addressed yet? And instead of simply coming up with a new rule, we could engage in design thinking by studying the problem, talking to people, testing out prototypes, etc.
Another idea I had was to engage in design thinking while writing how-to manuals for the various apps we learn to use. I came up with this idea when I was thinking about how to kill a number of different birds (I love killing more than one bird with one stone). When I wasn’t sure if every classroom had a projector, I started thinking about ways to demo apps in small groups and enabling students to teach other. Another one of my goals has been to find a way to encourage teachers to use more apps in their classes. I really hate how technology is viewed as a standalone class. As students learn how to use more powerful tools in technology class, they should be able to leverage those tools in their other classes. Producing a set of manuals can help on both goals. If students have a manual to refer to, they can teach each other and learn on their own. If teachers have a manual to refer to, they might be more willing to try apps out in their own classes. And if parents have a manual to refer, they may opt to buy some of those apps for home, and kids can use the manuals (if they’re also online) outside of school. It’s a win-win-win for everyone. And the icing on the cake is if students engage in design thinking to develop the manuals themselves—studying the problem, building and testing prototypes, talking with users, and constantly iterating. It’s always been a dream of mine for students to create and continuously add to/improve a body of knowledge over time. Creating a set of manuals and surveying the school’s surrounding biome would both work. Instead of starting from scratch each year, students would be able to evaluate and build on what previous classes did. There’s the whole “culture” and “cultural tool” thing again!
