I have been asked this question dozens of times by as many administrators, all of whom have seen no clear connection between computing, SMART board lessons, or video presentations in a foreign language classroom. To be fair, I have heard of utopic, far flung districts on the fringes of the mapped educational multiverse -in a previous era of my career, I had, in fact, taught in one of these. It was a smallish planetoid, one that formed part of the CUNY star system, but let us not digress. Unfortunately this has not been my recent experience. Given the current paradigm of necessity for a more global perspective; not just in terms of our on-the-cusp-of-drastically-changing foreign policy, but also in terms of celebrating the widely diversified international society that is our national culture. With these considerations we arrive at a deeper comprehension of our country’s identity. Our needs in the global marketplace, political arena, and intellectual community, demand foreign language classes and the enduring understandings they impart should quickly rise to the top of the priority list in terms of core curricula.
Why then, the question, you ask? For years, and granted, I can only speak from the perspective of someone who has been tenured solely in the NYC DOE, foreign language has taken a back seat to the much more popular and avant garde mission of ensuring that all students, regardless of background are achieving at higher levels on standardized tests in Math, Science, English and Social Studies. Having said that, the purpose of this article is not to have a lengthy treatise on score reporting and its potential faults, or the real prioritization of courses. However, at no point in any subject teacher’s tenure should they have to hear, “X subject just wasn’t highest on our priority list…” from their principal as an explanation for why readily available technology was not deployed to their room.
Enduring Understanding #1: Technological Literacy is applicable across the content areas
Math, Science, English, and Social Studies are easy marks for computational endeavors. With the advent of programs like JMAP, sites like RegentsPrep.org, and the Adobe Flash animated gallery items in the SMART Notebook for science experiments, not to mention word processing software utilizable for essays of all sorts, it would seem highly illogical to not deploy extant technology heavily into the areas aforementioned. But, allow me to ask you, what of the Foreign Language (FL) Classroom? The FL Class is quite possibly the only place where cross curricular integration of themes and material is made easy. History class studying a unit on World War I? Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and the attendant Rockefeller Center controversy are all applicable topics. Is your Science class working on a unit on conservation? The Amazon, its seemingly endless supply of flora and fauna (despite our most earnest efforts at deforestation), and the incredibly interesting people that live there – especially a recently highlighted tribe on the Peru/Brazil border that was proven not to be ‘lost’ or even ‘uncontacted’ but rather, still living in the same environment they had been for centuries but now find themselves under threat from Peru’s logging industry. Your Math class is working on a unit about proportions? Calculate the precise measurements required in order for the Maya to have been able to construct an entire network of cities, all geographically oriented, and all of which had as major fixtures in their planning temples that were properly oriented to view important celestial happenings. Then realize that they didn’t possess the luxury of things like calculators, or even modern tools to hew the rock, or machinery like cranes to haul the several tons of stone up to the top of these structures. Sounds like a physics problem if I ever heard one.
These are just some of the readily available connections. Sit down with me to coffee some time and I’ll tell all the really juicy tidbits. But all joking aside, each and every one of the themes I’ve listed above have extensive web-questable, SMARTboard-able, high interest presentations (I know, I’ve written a few) freely available at the click of a Google search button. Vocabulary lists for word walls, reproducible activities, and classroom projects abound for the interested Foreign Language teacher who knows where to look.
Enduring Understanding #2: Multimedia and Web content don’t just occur in English
This awareness comes readily at no surprise to those in the education field (or, I expect it does not) though, to see the veritable shock and awe reflected on students’ faces when they realize that not only do newspapers of the caliber of the New York Times exist in places like Argentina, Spain, Mexico or that -for the native speakers- there might be words in Spanish that they don’t even know exist. Authentic, YouTube-like embedded videos and links that lead to a plethora of high interest related materials, all in the target language offer limitless possibilities in terms of interdisciplinary unit development. National Geographic, New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, El Repertorio Español and inordinate numbers of others maintain entire servers full of multimedia material in both Spanish and English. The aforementioned sites notwithstanding, it should also be readily made clear that searching for podcasts, wikis, and creating a group document (if you haven’t yet, check out Google Docs, it’ll be your next best friend whenever you have to come up with a project involving multiple partners) are all made exceedingly easy with the click of the ‘Search’ button in your favorite engine. Of course, it should come as no surprise to anyone reading this article that all of the above materials can be easily incorporated into your favorite SMART Notebook presentation, or coalesced into an online format for easy e-mailing, posting to e-chalk, or your favorite wiki, which can then be e-mailed to any admin for easy viewing.
Enduring Understanding #3: 21st Century Education for EVERY class is the desired goal.
At the inception of my credentialing process, yea these many long years, we were introduced to, and trained to a moderate level of proficiency in, programs such as Photoshop, the Microsoft Office Suite, Microsoft Front Page (or whatever its equivalent was at the time), effective uses of e-mail, internet searches, and webquests (a relatively new phenomenon at the time). The purpose, ostensibly, was instilling in us a capacity to not only utilize such tools effectively in the instruction of our classes, but also being able to impart that knowledge (the training of trainers, so to speak) to our students. It was therefore a significant affront to not personal educational philosophy, but also the entirety of how my entire cadre of educational professionals had been trained to hear the aforementioned question that spawned this very article. Incredulous that such an opinion could even possibly approximate the whole of administrative thought towards such a fundamentally crucial sector of the Humanities, I sought out other administrations in supposedly more favorable environments only to be confronted by precisely the same disappointingly confrontational attitude. This year, working in a highly respected, nationally ranked IB school, buried just barely beneath the surface of a district purportedly plainly patting itself on the back for having instituted a wide reaching, fully funded, and nearly universally deployed technology initiative, the very same question is being asked of not only myself, but every other language teacher on my faculty. At the same time, science and math teachers on my educational team have complained to me about having SMART boards in their rooms because they see the technology as too ungainly, unwieldy, and beyond their capacity to realistically put into practice. These same teachers, it should be made clear, have been in the education game a similar amount of time as have I. This phenomenal discombobulation of priorities is only possible in the current schema of administrative thought where all thematic subject areas are created equal, but some are more equal than others. Despite pre-adolescent, and adolescent situational awareness being just slightly less than optimal, they can still see a major discrepancy between those subject areas where the figure at the top of the pyramidal power structure has deemed it necessary to flood the environment with toys, and those it has not with an altogether stunning facility. Such glaring disparities in the as yet untainted faces of individuals in their formative years creates a paradigm of thought, effectively lessening their respect for, and appreciation of, the Foreign Language Classroom.
Enduring Understading #4: Technology should never be used as a weapon of last resort or an Improvised Educational Device, but rather a daily tool to complement a teacher’s already well developed base of content area knowledge.
Our students are all children of the digital age. At one point in history, a rather popular e-mail made the rounds (back in the days before blogs. Somebody get my cane,) declaring the stark contrasts in the generation gap between those of us just beginning our teaching careers (at the time, 10 years ago,) things like –
- The words ‘SUV’ and ‘fuelish’ have always been a part of their vocabulary.
- They’ve grown up conscious of no other president besides Bill Clinton.
- Elvis has never been IN the building, much less left.
- TVs have always had a remote.
- There has always been an internet.
…and so forth
In the same vein, now 10 years (-shudder-) later, an entirely new list should be getting formulated, and indeed, I must attempt to leave my indelible mark here:
- ROFL, LMAO, OMG, BRB, TTYL, GGRNTS, and Kk are not garble that represents results from a failed attempt at word processing. They are instead entire phrasal expressions used daily by our youth, and you should be familiar with them. Definitions for the above, and myriad other phrasal combinations you’ve never heard of can be found at Urban Dictionary.
- A ‘sidekick’ is no longer what the Sundance Kid was to Butch Cassidy, nor what Robin was to Batman. Its current iteration is a communication nerve center whose proper operation (or something closely akin to it) is now very nearly a requirement for any pre-, post-, or those attempting to recapture, retain, or represent their adolescence.
- Podcast does not entail the aliens from ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ going on a fishing trip. They can actually be used as a highly effective teaching tool, utilizable for recording videos of lectures that students can then download and view in absentia.
- ‘You’re on my space!!!’ (normally squealed in a high pitched voice, regardless of the gender of the squealer) does not represent an incorrect lexical choice in terms of the preposition. Likewise, asking someone if they have ‘aim’ doesn’t necessarily entail that you are questioning them as to their marksmanship (although, in the odd case, it still does. Archery teams, for example – I hear – do still exist in some high schools.)
- ‘Google’, is now used to refer to something entirely different than for which its homonym root, normally seen attached to the suffix ‘-plex’ was originally intended. In the same vein, ‘Google’, ‘Friend’, and ‘Text’ are all now verbs as well as nouns.
- ‘Music’, as such, has always existed digitally. There are no such things as ‘records’ unless you’re in a school’s main office.
- They can’t play the game ‘6 degrees from Kevin Bacon’ because Kevin Bacon hasn’t been in that many things they might recognize.
- The operations ‘Cut’ and ‘Paste’ have never involved any tools that you can hold in your hand.
- They can’t tell you what the letters ‘GPS’ stand for, but they sure as heck know how to operate one better than you.
- Many of them don’t know how to tell time using an analog (nor what the word analog means!) watch.
Every last one of these items has purposefully been selected to be inherently related to the digital realm. The stunning pace of technological advancement – processor speeds are only the tip of the iceberg – not to mention knowledge creation, and the glaring responsibility incumbent on each and every adult in their lives to be up to date on new and sometimes improved terminology for each of the processes, items, and communication methods is immense. That said, it would be tantamount to irresponsible behavior to allow even one of the child’s classrooms, no matter what the administration’s view of the priority of a specific subject matter, to go without the benefit of access to technology (read: SMART boards, internet capable desktops or laptops, etc.) for their lessons. Training is available in your town, and if not, get a hold of the good folks at SMARTtech, or don’t hesitate to contact me, I would love to come help you.
The only other conclusionary statement I will include here is that education (much like art, but, that is a topic for another article) is always a political event. Let us recall then, that at this crucial moment we should present a unified front, an indomitable force for the evolution of the educational experience as a whole. However, the support has to be much more than top down, it also has to be within faculties and interdepartmental because truly, the only people that really stand to lose when such crucial classroom tools are withheld are our students.
