Empowerment thru technology

Picture a split screen. On the left you see a passive student alternating between listening and doodling and daydreaming to keep things interesting for himself during the 50-minute class period. The right side of the screen draws your attention, where another student edits a wiki entry, tweets a couple reading questions, and creates a powerpoint to engage the meaty coursework at hand. The proactive approach to learning demonstrated by the student on the right suggests that he is applying and creating knowledge beyond processing it in short-term memory like the student on the left. But the difference in engagement is not necessarily the major point of my post. I want to think about the difference between these depictions in terms of how the lesson plans differently establish the student's role within the classroom. For the student engaging with technology, the simultaneously individual and collaborative acts of reformulating subject matter in different ways across technological mediums can transform a student's conception of his place within the classroom and with learning in general. Plus, the student might even be more knowledgeable and skilled in using the technology than the teacher who incorporated it into the lesson plan. Cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito captures the implications of using students' prior skills: "You're seeing the shift in expertise in authority, so that kids may know a lot about certain things, but parents can also bring really important expertise to the table, and that's when you see a really productive shift in power dynamic around learning." When students are empowered through the use of technology, the classroom exchange between teachers and students becomes a more equal collaboration.

An Edutopia interview with Marco Torres, a social studies teacher at San Fernando High School in Los Angeles County, describes how technology empowers his students to explore their cultural identity through the planning, production, and presentation of videos. Marcos explained,

"As Latinos, our history traditionally has been told through dance, through song, through literature, like poetry for example, through the arts, murals, through stories that our ancestors told. So we've had a very multimedia approach to learning about ourselves but I think that the people who traditionally gave us those stories or those abilities, as they're dying off, we need to take advantage of the resources we have now to preserve that and to give the kids those tools so they can continue their story because we have a very multimedia history. Well, now we have multimedia to help us preserve that."

Project-based learning with technology also empowers students to pursue their particular interests—as Torres would say, "to uncover, rather than just cover" the curriculum. He described the experience of one student,

"I have a student in Connie, Consuelo Molina. She did a project for my economics class. And she had to take a look at the effects of the world economy. She really internalized this information. This was a period of my curriculum that she wanted to uncover, rather than just cover. And she wanted to talk about some of the consequences of the world economy and the world market and the protests that were happening in Washington and Seattle around the World Trade Organization. So she decided to focus on sweatshops and wanted to alert the people in her class on what she found while doing this report on sweatshops.

She knew that if she had done this project traditionally, in front of a class, the information would have died there in the class. She knows that if she had written it on a piece of paper and given it to the teacher, the teacher, because of the large number of the students, would probably just look down the sheet, look for mistakes, and not read what Connie felt.

But Connie decided to do a documentary on this process. She talked about the facts that she found and shared them with the class. What I like about it is at the end she says, "Look, this is what I found. You decide what you want to do with this information. Just remember that the workers are moms and sisters, like ... you and me." She posted this documentary on the Web. And several people have found it -- the women's human rights conference in Paris saw it and asked her permission to show it. Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, asked if he could show the project to about 10,000 educators. For Connie, the fact that her passion and interest in talking about something that really bothered her has reached every corner of the world was an experience she'll never forget."

You can watch Connie's video here:

You can read the Edutopia interview with Marco Torres here: http://www.edutopia.org/marco-torres-empowering-students-through-multimedia