June 2006 — Features
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Teaching with Technology: The Secrets of Their Success
SECRET #4: Get an interactive whiteboard.
Rod Ziolkowski is not just any physics teacher. Educational Testing Service recently contacted Whitney High School in Cerritos, CA, to let the school know that Ziolkowski’s students are, according to the test scores, “best in the world.” What’s behind all this? Of all the technology he’s seen in the last 20 years of teaching, Ziolkowski says the interactive whiteboard is the one device that’s truly changed instruction for the better. “It allows you to do things that you just couldn’t do in a traditional classroom,” he says.
For example, in 2004, when a private company sent a spaceship into space and won the X Prize (a $10-million award intended to encourage private space exploration), the very next day, using Internet video footage of the event, Ziolkowski’s students independently verified that the craft had indeed met the altitude requirements of the contest. “They analyzed it using physics, and we could confirm their work,” Ziolkowski says. “This is really powerful. To see the physics we are studying in class directly applying to a problem that’s in the news today—that’s cool.
“Probes, handhelds, video cameras, and video microscopes are small pieces that just add to the total picture, but I use the Smart Board every day. I’m amazed at what’s on the Internet for teachers to use for free that you can put up on the interactive whiteboard. You can make circuits work, show how sound waves come together to make complicated sounds, and do all this visually—nicely and clearly—with wonderful applications. I don’t think most people know all this even exists.”
SECRET #5: Don’t keep secrets.
So, as I was saying at the start, there I was in Alan Kay’s office, having formally pledged not to reveal any secrets. But that oath ran counter to my assignment: to discover and disclose the secrets of teaching with technology. And considering that Kay’s new product has managed to leak out into parts of Europe, South America, Japan, Korea, India, Nepal, and elsewhere, there’s no use sitting on it any longer. Signed documents be damned!
The only way to describe Kay’s creation is to call it a mediarich authoring environment with a simple, powerful, scripted object model for many kinds of objects, created by end users, that runs on many platforms and is free and open-source. Got that?
Incredibly, the program includes 2-D and 3-D graphics, images, text, particles, presentations, Web pages, videos, sound, musical instrument digital interface (MIDI)—just about everything you can think of. With it, teachers and students can share desktops with other users in real time, allowing for all kinds of immersive mentoring and play over the Internet. The program is multilingual, and it runs on more than 20 platforms.
Belying its power is its playful name: Squeak eToys. And it may do what seems to be the impossible— with such an intuitive, object-oriented interface, it could propel US students into a whole new interest in and understanding of science and math. And in light of our kids’ current standing in those two areas, that would be tantamount to reinventing the world.
Victor Rivero is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer specializing in education and technology.
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