June 2006 — Features
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Teaching with Technology: The Secrets of Their Success
Foremost leaders in education technology provide five lessons on using today’s tools to engage students, recharge teachers, and in some cases, change the world.
THIS DOESN’T SEEM to be the place to come to discover the secrets of teaching with technology. Between drab warehouses to the left and lonesome train tracks to the right, Alan Kay’s office is in a nondescript building set in the concrete fringes of Los Angeles. But its interior puts the exterior to shame. It is swank and cavernous—a good place to hide, as Kay, nowhere to be seen, appears to be doing.
“Can I get you a drink?” asks Kim Rose, a cognitive scientist who works with teachers and students in various schools and community learning centers, applying Kay’s ideas. Alan Kay, one of the earliest pioneers in educational technology, is—as he should be—busy. Busy not like the rest of us are busy. Busy plotting-thereinvention- of-the-world busy.
Over in the corner, a British-style red phone booth adds to the room’s allure and catches the eye. “When that phone rings,” Rose says, “pick it up and say the password.” Just then, the black receiver begins to vibrate with a faint jingle. With that, Rose is gone. Speaking the magic word into the receiver appears to activate a hydraulic mechanism. The booth’s back begins to fall away. A short corridor off to the right leads to a threshold.
What happens next is not transmissible. Certainly not right
now. A smiling receptionist had made sure of it with a float of
legal papers just minutes before. What can be said is that the
mouse arrow you move on your screen and those little adjustable
boxes that open and close, the icons that you click, the very idea
of a laptop computer—for all of this you can, in part, give thanks
to Alan Kay. And without knowing it, in the midst of a search to
uncover ways to teach with technology that can transform classroom
instruction, I had just stepped into his office. But more on
that later. Here are the revelations my quest turned up:
SECRET #1: Turn On to tablets.
A year into their initial deployment, ThinkPad X41 Tablet PCs from Lenovo continue to elicit raves at allgirls Saint Mary’s School in Raleigh, NC. According to Head of School Theo W. Coonrod, “Classroom instruction and student learning have been revolutionized with this one cool machine.”
Saint Mary’s teachers say they find the tablet much better than laptops. “There’s no screen barrier between the student and the teacher, so [communication] is much clearer,” says computer science teacher Jessica Sepke. Plus, “at the end of each lesson, I have a copy of everything I wrote.” This comes in handy. Recently, a student in Sepke’s class had been hospitalized for 25 days. Each of those days, Sepke posted her notes online exactly as they appeared in class, and the student didn’t miss a thing.
