Follow the Leader
Principal Tim Tyson is the Pied Piper of educational technology
By Kathy Ishizuka -- School Library Journal, 12/1/2005
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Indeed, since Tyson arrived at Mabry four years ago, its students have made great strides. Last year, for instance, 100 percent of the school’s seventh graders scored at or above grade level in reading. But lofty test scores and impressive grades aren’t what turn Tyson on. As he flat out told his student audience at a recent assembly, school is “not about making grades, but something more important—to learn everything we can learn.”
To help kids achieve that goal, Mabry’s instructional plan calls for a lot of technology. But Tyson has done more than simply up the number of workstations. He’s made sure that technology has been thoughtfully integrated across the curriculum. As a result, students are now doing everything from podcasting to producing videos that would make Steven Spielberg look twice. There’s even an annual Mabry Film Festival, which Tyson launched to showcase how technology engages young learners. The event is so successful, it’s attracted national attention, as has the school’s cutting-edge Web site, which is built entirely around staff-created blogs, making it a snap for teachers, parents, and students to keep in touch. For its innovative use of technology, Mabry was recently honored with a Schools of Distinction Award, sponsored by Scholastic and Intel. We caught up to Tyson last month, as he was preparing for this year’s schoolwide film festival.
What’s your take on technology and learning?
I have an odd notion: using technology should be practical, empowering, even enjoyable. Technology is a tool to help us connect with others more effectively, allowing us to better express who we are, what we value, and what we want to share with others. There’s just no good reason why this journey we call school shouldn’t be full of wonder and discovery for both our teachers and our students—and it’s my job to somehow make it that way.
Why are blogs so important to you?
After launching my own personal blog last spring, I had a hunch that this tool could be used very effectively in the school setting. I shared my blogging experiences with our teachers and, soon thereafter, they inquired about launching their own classroom blogs. So we hosted an after-school dinner and training session, where our instructional lead teacher agreed to set up a blog for anyone who was interested. To my delight, there were quite a few takers.
I then coaxed every teacher into posting to a blog to show them that it’s as easy as sending e-mail. By this fall, every Mabry teacher was required to maintain a blog on their classroom activities, with updates posted at least once a week.
How did the blogs evolve into a Web site?
I had been playing with the idea of creating a new Web site. Our existing site—the sole responsibility of one already overextended staffer—wasn’t working. Could blogging be the answer? With a little manipulation of the blog template tags, our weblog experiment evolved into a full-fledged content management system. Mabry’s site now consists of about 100 blogs that describe every classroom, the media center, even the nurse’s office.
You use podcasting for everything from teaching French to addressing parents to your own one-on-one conversations with students. Why are you such a big fan of the technology?
Podcasting is a tremendous learning tool. To quote developmental psychologist Jean Piaget: “Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves.” Podcasting provides students with new ways of knowing and problem solving and enables them to demonstrate their newfound understanding in compelling and significant ways.
Can you give us an example of a cool podcasting project?
One of our teachers is having students record podcast interviews with veterans from World War II to the Gulf War. In so doing, she is helping pass the oral history of one generation to another and enabling students to create digital representations of their new knowledge in a medium that is relevant to their teen culture. Now, how powerful is that?
Why did you decide to emphasize experiential learning even though the president’s education plan, No Child Left Behind, promotes standards-based education?
I see my role, my contribution, to be that of empowering children to be ambitious and creative problem solvers who can function in a global environment and help make it a better place, not to produce test scores.
What about grades?
While grades have some level of meaning to students, the substance of that meaning is waning. I believe this relates to the perceived relevance of school among today’s students. I am fascinated that Mabry students will choose to spend over 50 hours outside of school working together to create a complex, demanding digital media product. They don’t get a grade for this project that is presented to an audience of about 1,000 at our annual film festival. They say what they value is watching the audience experience their work.
Tell us more about the students’ films.
One film screened during last year’s festival moved everyone to tears. The project, a documentary about elephants, started with some footage that our science teacher shot while on a trip to Zimbabwe and Botswana. To contrast the beautiful images of these animals in the wild, the kids visited the Atlanta zoo to film captive elephants. The students noticed that these creatures looked different than their wild cousins. So they consulted an exotic animal expert at the University of Georgia, where they learned that the animals suffered from a skin disease resulting from their captivity. The students then petitioned the school board to suspend all field trips to the zoo until the elephants received better care.
There’s a powerful message here for educators. Students want to learn and express themselves. They cherish the opportunity to move others, to value their work in a way that is far more significant to them than a number on a piece of paper. Active, project-based learning involving digital media is a powerful tool that allows children to gain understanding in profound ways. Meanwhile, the federal government sets a minimum standard emphasizing basic, low-level performance.
A librarian once told me that education is the one field in which you can stick your head in the sand for 30 years and avoid technology. If that’s true, what’s your advice to educators who are technophobes and feel marginalized?
I challenge any educator who feels marginalized to explore ways in which to share his or her inner gifts that are relevant and meaningful to learners. And technology is not necessarily the answer. I know teachers who use technology in meaningless, low-level ways. Though a geek myself, I know teachers who brilliantly touch children’s lives without flicking a power switch. The question is could we affect children even more profoundly if we used the power switch?
Learning new things, especially those things that intimidate us (in my case, never throw me a basketball), keeps us in touch with the learning process. If we overcome our own lack of skills and knowledge and find new ways of knowing and understanding, we model problem solving for the youngsters in our lives. The teacher-as-facilitator concept can be terror itself or a wonderful opportunity for sharing and living in an authentic learning community in which we are all learners, and we are all students. So, I guess what I am saying here is that avoiding technology and feeling marginalized as an educator is ultimately a personal choice.
How do you envision the ideal library media center?
I imagine the media center as the area with the biggest rides in the park. The swings soar higher, the merry-go-round spins faster, the jungle gym towers to the heavens, and, above all, the children are laughing and screaming with delight. You no longer hear “Shhhhh!” but shouts of “Yes!” frequently accompanied by gestures of triumph. Children flock to the media center, where the media specialist seems to always know the coolest resources.
The media specialist would collaborate with his or her peers to teach children both digital and analog research skills, including safe and ethical use of all materials. Rather than the predigested units of information that constitute most curriculum, the media specialist offers children intellectually stimulating resources with which they can “play.” The media center then becomes a place of hyper connectedness: to the worldwide Web, to technology that empowers learners, to collaborative work groups within the building and beyond. The media specialist will also disseminate student-produced digital media to the world at large through blogs and wikis.
Media specialists and others seeking to implement technology projects are often stymied by territory issues with IT staff or difficulties with teacher collaboration. Any suggestions?
Let’s tackle the IT staff first. Oh, was that Freudian? Productive personal relationships with IT personnel are essential. Years ago I started hosting a luncheon celebration for our district technology leaders to thank them for helping us attain our educational goals. I always celebrate specific project successes, even have students on hand to describe what the projects mean to them personally. We have found that IT people become personally connected to something they may have never seen before: the way wires and boxes can touch the lives of children.We also invite IT staff to our VIP party the night of our annual film festival. They are completely blown away by what 11-, 12-, and 13-year-olds produce with digital tools, the tools that IT is responsible for maintaining.
As for facilitating collaboration, one successful strategy we use is the train-the-trainer model of professional development. Following a successful project, we try to replicate it by having the staff involved train their peers. Our ILT also helps facilitate meaningful technology implementation. At present, we have actually created higher demand for technology than we have resources to use. So, regrettably, we must focus on a limited number of projects each year.
You’ve been inspired by Thomas Friedman’s book The World Is Flat (Farrar, 2004), which describes the democratization of knowledge that has resulted from the digital revolution. What does this concept mean for schools?
Despite the work of great educational thinkers like Dewey, Piaget, and Papert and well-intended reform movements and federal legislation, too many schools are nothing more than information distribution systems.
I want schools to become production systems. I envision students producing exemplary digital knowledge products. I see students writing their own online textbooks. I envision them collaborating with people of all ages all over the world. There is tremendous opportunity for educators and children here, as pervasive computing has already transformed society.
Something Thomas Friedman said really crystallized the concept: With pervasive connectivity, “The small can act really big, and the really big can act small.” And boy have we seen it here, where a 12-year-old, a sixth grader, can produce a video product that has adults in tears and moves them to act. Students understand that technology gives them a powerful voice. But if you’ve got access to the whole wide world and you don’t have anything to say, you’ve wasted something, So I tell our students ‘I want you guys to say something important.’ And I see them taking it in, and those gears are just spinning.
What other titles are sitting on your nightstand?
Actually, I only read a limited number of genres: technical writing (related to technology, naturally) and nonfiction (typically related to sociology, anthropology, and educational reform). I just finished reading Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner; and Podcasting Hacks by Jack Herrington. Herrington’s book is an excellent and comprehensive resource on all things podcasting. I highly recommend it to those interested in creating podcasts. Regrettably he doesn’t cover video podcasting as it has only been possible very recently.
I am presently reading When Religion Becomes Evil by Charles Kimball, and a variety of Seymour Papert’s works on children, learning, and computing. Papert is a brilliant thinker. I love those authors who challenge me to think more deeply. Sitting on my “read soon” stack is Ruby K. Payne’s A Framework for Understanding Poverty, Scaling Up Success: Lesson from Technology-Based Educational Improvement, by Dede, Honan, and Peters, and The World Café, Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations that Matter by Juanita Brown.
I also must confess to reading a large number of blogs through RSS. Almost all of these are related to education, web design, technology, digital media, news and politics.
| Author Information |
| Kathy Ishizuka is SLJ's technology editor. |
