Technological Devolution

I was sitting in grade nine math class, ten weeks ahead of the other students, when Mr. M came and sat beside me. Mr. M was the resource teacher for the gifted students at my high school and was therefore in charge of planning all IPRC meetings. Mr. M never had much to say to me, and this day was no exception, so as he watched me progress through the learning guides he sighed and said, "Back in my day you had to use a slide rule for calculations like that."

I was unimpressed. A slide rule? How old are you?

My parents had shared any number of stories like this over the years, and it just seemed like such a grown-up thing to say. I did the polite thing---smile and nod---and went on with my work, never stopping to actually inquire as to what a slide rule actually was.

Flash forward fifteen years and here I sit in my attic, surrounded by boxes brought home after cleaning out my grandparents' house, and what do I find but a slide rule. The funny thing is: no matter how long I look at this device, I can make no sense of it whatsoever.



Like this slide rule, technology has a time and a place in education, and it is of no use to students if they are not trained on how to use it properly. Or if as in the case of Mathies, the technology runs on Adobe Flash, which is famously incompatible with iPads, the most common form of classroom technology today.

It seems to me that sometimes we use technology just for the sake of using technology. We feel pressured by the grand ideas of 21st Century Learning and try to compensate for our shortcomings by throwing things like math video games into the mix thinking that they will in some way benefit students, when really we have failed to vet the material and blindly assumed that students will find it engaging. I know that when I sit down and play Demolition Division as a grown man that knows his times tables and has nothing at stake in the game, I still find it extremely stressful. How should students feel?



I learned most of my times tables through Math Castle, which was still considered "new" when I was in elementary school, and I have no fond memories of the game whatsoever. As far as being in the gifted class went, I was the worst at mental math, and so I had to sit and suffer through the constant embarrassment of my castle being loudly obliterated over the computer's integrated sound card for everyone to hear. It was as if those little UFO lasers were not only eroding my castle walls, but my self-esteem as well. Where was the evidence of learning there?

That is not to say that all technology is bad. It was incredibly useful to have a Smart Board during my first practicum. To be able to pull up pre-made materials in Google Slides, then work on the board next to the screen gave me great flexibility in my lessons, and the Smart Board made collaborative data management tasks incredibly effective. And as for my students, Kahoot! was never frowned upon. I used Kahoot! quizzes as check-ins every Friday afternoon, and created them myself so that I knew they were directly linked to our week's work. The response to this was so enthusiastic I have since used Kahoot! for a variety of topics, even reproductive anatomy.



The key to implementing technology in the classroom is planning. There are so many models and tools and acronyms out there that it can sometimes be overwhelming, but I have found that the SAMR for technology is very practical. The actions of substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition really put an emphasis on what role technology is playing in the classroom. For example, when students play Demolition Division, technology simply is being used as a substitution for rote learning. The game still looks and feels much like rote mathematics, but with the added unpleasantness of time limits and anxiety. And while there might be a time and place for learning by rote, we often leave it at that---technology simply acts as a substitute for traditional instruction and the learning is therefore still very traditional in style. Games like Ratio Blaster never go any deeper than basic knowledge and understanding, and maybe this is the key to implementing technology in the classroom. How does the use of technology align with the achievement chart categories?

When we think in terms of technology and the achievement chart, it is very easy to use the aforementioned games to address knowledge and understanding. But as we all know, setting up tech in a classroom can be very time-consuming, so why go through all of that trouble to substitute learning by rote with learning by rote? It is only once we begin the augmentation, modification, and redefinition of tasks through the use of technology that we get into the 21st century skills that we want students to develop as well as rich tasks for assessing communication and application. The purpose of technology in the classroom is for enhancing learning, and we must be careful not to treat it as a shortcut for teachers to minimize planning. Technology does not make rich tasks, teachers do.