On Friday I received a request from one of our PlansForUs users. The request was for a lesson plan on Spiders that was appropriate for a pre-k age group. Lucky for our user I was actually sending our monthly newsletter so I included the request in the newsletter. Last night a lesson was posted on spiders:

Math Spiders

While the math portion did not necessarily work for our user, she is using the plan as an art project and is really excited at how this worked. This is the power of the community and we are working on solving the problem of how to simply engage you in this sharing of ideas.

I am going to be working on this thought over the weekend, but I wanted to share it with you, my loyal readers, to get your thoughts. I am interested in knowing what the layers of needs would compose the PlansForUs Hierarchy of Teacher’s Needs. I began to ponder this on my walk home after a thought provoking discussion with Tom Hatch of Columbia Teachers College that I was privileged to have this week.

The fact is that there may be a myriad of different Hierarchy of Needs due to the variety of  educational contexts that teacher are faced with on a daily basis. Having said that, I want to be crass and un-nuanced and try to come up with a few generalizations. I am particularly interested in your own theories of what these needs may be.

Now, should you choose not to participate, fear not, as I will provide my theory to you regardless of your participation. Below you will find Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (image is from WikiMedia); have a great weekend and I look forward to your thoughts. (FYI-I did a Google search on”Maslow’s Hierarchy of Teacher’s Needs” and came up with nothing…we’re breaking new ground here folks)

I was just was turned onto the blog “Bionic Teaching” and I think it is great. I found the post  “Magic Bullets Don’t Exist” particularly interesting. In the post Tom Woodward works to dispel the myth that Technology is the panacea for what ails education in a point by point disputation of a TechLearning post.
The essential fact is that teaching is the key. Supporting teachers with professional development and lesson plans that indicate how to integrate technology into a lesson are the key to bringing technology into the classroom.

As a result PlansForUs is focused on integrating with a teachers lesson plan development workflow. The technology that sits behind this workflow is what improves the lesson planning experience. Teachers write lessons, PlansForUs expands the way that a teacher can access new ideas for that lesson.

It is about teaching, not technology. That is something that must be remembered if technology is ever to break out of its edutech echo chamber and into the mainstream. Thanks to Tom for elucidating this important distinction, I look forward to reading more.

It is a miserably humid day in NYC. Luckily for me, my apartment stays relatively cool without the need for A/C. Thanks to a low floor and high ceilings, I think I will manage to get through today

Onto more pertinent matters. I read Gary Stager’s piece on the declining costs of laptops vs the stagnant costs of school supplies. Gary highlighted the fact that these cost curves are getting perilously close to meeting. Gary was asking why we are wasting resources on traditional learning implements, when the ultimate learning implement, an Internet connected laptop is only a fraction more expensive.

It is a powerful question and one worth pondering….however I think the answer is in the comments to his post. In particular, the infrastructure for adopting such a change is not really in place. That infrastructure is both technical and human. This infrastructure excuse is miserable as it is cuts the legs out from so many great proposals, but it is ultimately a powerful reason for saying no.

Infrastructure is the key to all things and it is a process that is long and drawn out. However, sometimes an event can trigger explosive growth and change. That trigger must be an economic opportunity where private resources come into play. What is that trigger in education?

1. The massive demographic shift- In California the shortage of teachers will be particularly acute, though I have looked at the stats from the Bureau of Labor Stats and it looks like nationally we are going to lose about 1/3 of our teachers to retirement in the next 7 years.

What Does This Mean?

It means that there are a lot of teacher openings to be filled by recent graduates or job transfers. The infrastructure of the human component just changed and they need help to be the best teachers they can be. Will the private sector fulfill this need by financing laptops for every child and a deep interconnectivity between classrooms and teachers?

2. What about broadband speeds and costs- According to this there are a whole lot of people in this world with faster broadband than the US and at a fraction of the cost. The Internet and Green Energy seem to be the long term impactful technologies to our world, so if the US is falling behind on our Internet what is the effect on our ability to grow our economy.

What Does This Mean?

Seems to me that if the US Government wakes up to the fact that our telecom/cable monopolies are derailing our ability to grow the economy, there is going to be a movement to solve the problem. That movement will probably be a big free market push to wire us up, or more than likely wireless us up. With a deep national investment both financially and psychically in changing our high speed Internet fortunes I would bet that our schools will be direct recipients of this high speed technology largesse. Now we have the infrastructure where laptops make sense in school.

I guess my question is, in 5 years will students be doing their back-to-school shopping at Apple and Best Buy or at Staples ?

Another food for thought: How many of you use listservs to find teaching ideas? What is the biggest downside to these listservs? Ryan Bretag wrote a response (it’s at the bottom) to my comment on why teachers might be resistant to adopting aggregators as their first foray into the wonders of Web 2.0. In his response he mentioned that a combination of Ning networks and Listservs may already be the tools that teachers need to find valuable teaching resources.

Yesterday my wife, a 1st grade teacher, came home exhausted and a bit emotionally overwhelmed. It was her first day of school and her first day as a head teacher. Half way through the day a new child was brought into her classroom. The new child was both hysterical and fundamentally lacking english language skills. While she has been working for 4.5 years in a variety of unique situations this event caught her off guard.
Having just got off the phone with her and hearing her confidence in how the day went, I am thankful for the collaborative environment in which she is teaching and for her own ability to call on her own deep reservoir of teaching skill. It seems that dealing with the unexpected and with characteristics and situations that lie well outside your control is the domain of the teacher.

Perhaps that’s why when I read this at NYC Educator (check out this blog for a unvarnished look into NYC public school teaching) it immediately caught my attention. The poem is entitled:

Tikkun Olam

by Abigail E. Meyers

  Our task begins

with giving order to the chaos created

by poverty, illiteracy, apathy,

the too-cool kids that make bad parents

or good parents with a too-cool world

to fight, exhausted by the battle

with neighbors, government, money,

broken glass, broken hearts, broken homes, broken lives—
this is where we begin.

We step in,

dressed more sharply than we’d like,

speaking more sharply than we’d like,

issuing rules and goals,

shaking our heads, straightening lines,

bleeding our wallets and minds

right from the start

to stanch the flow from our hearts

as long as we can

before this newest collection

of dreamers, criminals, fighters, angels—

children, all—works their way in
before we can begin

to bring them to order

and teach them to teach themselves,

restore them to the restoration

of the universe, raise up a million saviors,

prop them up with stickers and pencils,

form them into wobbly queues, love them, love them.