Ever since I was a boy growing up in Miami, Florida, I dreamed of living in a small town surrounded by nature. In the mid-1970’s, when the Marielitos fell upon Miami, violence increased to incredible proportions. It was no longer safe to walk the streets. So we moved to California in hopes of a better life from one big city to an even bigger city. At Main Street school, I learned a lot about what technology could do for my students, but my efforts to connect the school and purchase enough computers and peripherals was slow. When I learned that my fiancee shared the same dream I did of living in a small town, we decided to move to Washington after visiting her sister in Port Townsend. I got a job teaching in a one-year, replacement contract position in a middle school right in Port Townsend and found that I enjoyed middle school. More than that, I found a school system that was years ahead of Main Street Elementary, in fact, where I envisioned Main Street to be at when I was done. It was like going through a time warp. After my contract was up in Port Townsend, I was hired in a continuing contract at Chimacum Middle School. Through Port Townsend and Chimacum I now have contacts of people who know technology and all envision making our schools 21st century schools. State of the art equipment, vast and complicated networks, and teachers who are willing to learn and try new things are what I found here. And, my wife and I now life in a place where the trees outnumber the cars, and there are no drive-by shootings. Here in Washington, I can live out my dreams and help bring about educational reform to help our children to succeed and be productive members of the 21st century.

TECHNOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOM

      The "pre-Civil War" classroom followed the 1600’s model of education that was necessary for an agrarian lifestyle. Schoolhouses consisted of one classroom where children of varying ages, what would now probably be considered 1st through about 10th grade, learned how to read, write, and do enough math to someday run their parents’ farm. No more was needed and that worked for that time. School started later in the day because children needed to do morning chores and ended early in the day so that children could get home in time to do their evening chores. Summers were taken off entirely because the children had to help around the farm round the clock to bring in the harvest. This model of education lasted for about 200 years until about after the Civil War when the Industrial Revolution began.

      At the time of the Industrial Revolution, large factories and assembly-line manufacturing were replacing one-at-time, slow, hand-made production. After 200 hundred years of the one classroom schoolhouse, education changed. The "post Civil War model of education", or "the factory model", saw the building of schools much in the same fashion as the building of factories. School buildings were big, housing many classrooms and all the classrooms pretty much looked alike. Small rooms with desks lined up in neat rows facing the desk and black board of the teacher. The teacher in this model remains in charge and is the source of all knowledge. Students still learned their basics along with whatever skills were needed for working successfully in a factory. One thing did not change though, both students and teachers still got their summers off. This model still exists today in the mentality of our nation.

      Even after 200 years, education has changed little. Classrooms with desks lined up in neat rows, with a teacher at the front delivering knowledge and writing on their black boards still seem to dominate education as we enter the 21st century. Still, we are finding hints at what a modern, 21st century classroom might look like. Changes in education have been added to the factory model. We see classrooms where the desks are no longer lined up in neat rows, but instead are arranged in creative ways to allow children to use their social skills and to learn from each other by reinforcing what is being learned. We are finding classrooms where students are solving problems in-depth through "constructivist, project-based teaching and learning approaches" instead of barely covering many aspects of many subjects. We are finding subjects being integrated instead of in isolation. We are finding technologies being used to help children communicate so that their cooperative and collaborative education reaches children in other cities, states, and even countries. And finally, we are finding classrooms where teachers are no longer the fount of knowledge with the last word. Teachers are finding out that they are becoming side-by-side learners, facilitators, coaches, and mentors. Teachers are able to help small groups of children as they move about a cooperatively learning classroom. And why is all this change occurring? Because our world is changing.

      One way or another, the world will change. Change is inevitable. Technology is changing our world in ways even the creators of the technologies themselves could not have dreamed. The Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) are bringing the world closer together by facilitating and greatly speeding up communication. Studies are showing that in today’s market, an adult will change jobs at least five or six times in her/his lifetime. Employers are looking for individuals who can get along with and work with other people. Careers where working with a small team on long-term projects, and then sharing information with other small teams through a Local Area Network (LAN) to then submit final project results or reports to people all over the world are a 21st century reality. Societal moves also suggest that as we approach the 21st century, more computer skills will be needed to get a job. "By the year 2000, an estimated 60 percent of new jobs in America will require advanced technological skills and computer know-how." Schools must meet the needs of an ever-changing world. Technology is an important tool for schools to meet the needs of today’s job market but technology alone will not accomplish much. Education has to be seen in a different light altogether.

      The advent of current technologies, such as overhead projectors, faster copy machines, television’s (TV’s) and VCR, TV cable, laser disc players and computers, into the classroom alone will not provide the changes needed to make education worthwhile and useful for the 21st century student. Today’s teachers employ a variety of methods to teach students. Everything from phonics to whole language, using exciting core literature to integrate many subjects, employing strategies that will support multiple learning styles, to using computers are found in today’s classroom. Teachers are finding that today’s children, brought on TV and Nintendo, are easily bored and turned off by factory model methods of teaching. Even the media that most adults aged 25 through 30 were brought up on, radio and TV, was linear with no interaction required by the viewer. The viewer just sat and listened to or watched programs from beginning to ending. Today’s technology, on the other hand, is highly interactive. Children can decide how the information they get is communicated and, in essence, children can talk to the programs they use and the games they play. So by the time children reach Middle School, teachers get sick of hearing, "how will this help me in the real world?" or some similar inquiry. Children are seeing what the world is like and if they do not find that in the classroom, then they have a right to wonder how what they are learning will help them. No one can deny that we all need the basics, but what is happening beyond the teaching of the basics needs to become more relevant to what is needed in the 21st century world.

THE 21ST CENTURY SCHOOL

      Children need to be engaged, they need to use higher order levels of thinking and problem solving. The days of the CTBS are coming to an end. No more will standardized, multiple guess tests be able to give a complete picture of 21st century students. Why are teachers assessing their students by grading final products from long-term projects and having students create portfolios of successful work if those students are going to be judged by different criteria? Tests like the California CLAS and Washington's own WASL tests have begun the change by asking students to think and answer questions based on manipulating data, not just remembering what they memorized. Students are called on to problem solve and answer open-ended questions where the answer was not as important as being able to explain the thought process and steps taken to get to the answer. Math series that schools are adopting now are very different from textbooks of old. No longer are there pages of practice problems with no tie-in to life. Pages in math books today may have only one or two problems which take a group of four children longer to solve than it took one child to do 30 or 40 in a traditional math book. And then there is the computer. Computers engage children unless they are used in the same drill and practice fashion as mimeographed practice sheets.

      Programs are being created all the time that teach students skills and concepts in rich new ways. Ways more and more like Nintendo game, for instance, are engaging children in learning. Virtual realities allow children not just to ask, "what if?" questions, but to experience what if bymanipulating what they see on their screens or through a set of specialized goggles. It is much easier to turn gravity off or engage antigravity on a virtual physics lab than it is in a real physics lab11. It is much more exciting to have Reader Rabbit reward you for learning the alphabet and spelling correctly than it is to do a worksheet. Not only is it exciting because it is visually and auditorially stimulating, as in television or Nintendo, but it also provides instant feedback. Teachers still have to grade papers and even when the test is graded as soon as it is completed, the rewards are not as fulfilling as in a competitive game. But computers do not only offer new and exciting ways to learn in the classroom, networking technologies can connect any classroom to the whole world through a school’s Wide Area Network (WAN).

      No more are small towns isolated from the rest of the world. If students who have lived all their lives in a rural town want to know what it is like in the big city, they can email other schools to get keypals. Communication between schools is instantaneous whereas before, penpals had to wait days, maybe weeks, to get a response to a letter with simple questions. Cooperative groups are no longer limited to only the students in one class or even in one school. The Web is teeming with collaborative, online projects that can include responses or data collected from students in different cities, states, and countries. Where before, the teacher would post student work on a bulletin board or in the local library for the community to see, now students can share their work with millions of people world-wide who are connected to the Internet through WWW publishing. HTML is easy enough for non-programmers to learn and if that was not sufficient, software like Claris Homepage or Microsoft Frontpage allow teachers and students to create web pages without knowing any HTML.

      More and more teachers are discovering the richness of publishing student work on the web. The web offers more than just another medium on which to post student work. As just another kind of bulletin board, the web can catapult students projects throughout the whole world. Anyone or any class with an Internet connection can access another class’ web site. If that was all there was to web publishing, then it would not be much more than an extended bulletin board, but even beyond that, the web offers other people accessing a web site the opportunity to communicate with the authors12. It offers interactivity, the key ingredient that children of the Nintendo are familiar with and crave. The authors of classroom web sites, in most cases, will be the students. A web page with a contact email address, invites those reading it to write the authors to critique, compliment, or just plain say they saw the web site. Children who have theirwork published on the WWW know that millions of people can see their work and that those who wish can write back. Web sites can have surveys or forms, or CGI programs can be made to have people write their feelings and reactions to the site right there on the page. The CGI script can then remake the web page adding the new comments. The possibilities are endless.

      So as instructors and educators of 21st century classrooms, it behooves us to become better acquainted with the technologies of the time. A few years ago it may have been enough to make a classroom web page with student work, but now web sites and web projects need more complexity and richness. It is no longer enough to see examples of student writing on a web page because that does not reach the Internet’s potential. Some of the best projects out there can be found as part of organizations such as The Global School Network’s (GSN) Cyber Fair Projects (http://www.gsn.org/cf/index.html) or the online contest, ThinkQuest (http://www.advanced.org/thinkquest/index.html). Their higher levels of excellence bring out the best in what teachers and students all over the world have to offer. And what makes them not just good as web sites, but also valuable, is that they provide useful information, they educate. The Internet has brought forth the information age. Information abounds in cyberspace and it is becoming easier to get at. What is most distasteful about the vast information that exists on theInternet is the unusable, obsolete, or just plain superfluous material that can be found just as easy
as the useful.

      With the technologies available, such as video conferencing, students in a classroom now have no limits to the extent of what they can participate in. Field trips may be cumbersome to plan and execute, but cyber trips cut down on cost, time, and trouble. Students can participate in solving community problems by communicating with those directly working on those problems. Students learning from and working with professionals in the field. What more could anyone ask of education? This is real life and pertinent. The skills that students need to work on to solve community or world issues will be taught from sheer necessity thereby increasing motivation to learn. Children, teenagers, young adults cannot do this alone. They need guidance and direction. And sometimes, they need motivation. This is where the teacher comes in.

      Teachers now need to assume the role of coach. When a problem comes up in the community, and new project may be born. The teacher assigns different students to do some preliminary researching to share with the larger group the new project. A meeting is called where students report on the problem at hand. The teacher advises on what can be done, who can be contacted, what materials there are on hand and which materials need to be procured. Students either volunteer for different jobs or the teacher assigns them. A timeline is created by all involved and the small teams set out to do their prospective jobs. The teacher now goes around to each group to give further assistance, one-on-one help with the skills needed, or to motivate. This new model of education requires a few more changes.

      Some children, especially teens, do not work well in the morning. Some prefer the morning. Two and half to three months off in the summer loses many opportunities for wonderful projects. Schools might consider going year-round and staying open much longer hours so that groups of students come and go in shifts throughout each day of the year. Hours of learning can be monitored by computer and students are assessed through their portfolio detailing the jobs accomplished and displaying different products. Students are no longer tested by having to memorize and regurgitate information in the higher grades, but rather work at their own pace. If something is not learned, the student will keep trying until s/he gets it.

      Another quality that the modern, 21st century classroom has is spontaneity. A constructivist, project-based lesson could be planned ahead of time by the teacher and that is fine. Students can be engaged and learn new skills and gain new insight. But when a student comes up with a new topic quite by accident, that topic provides more motivation for learning than the prepared project. This spontaneous creation of a project from students own interests and curiosities is known as the Natural Approach. "Formal Learning" or the structured learning that takes place in the classroom is not sufficiently motivating because the students may or may not be curious or interested in the topic at hand. Students really pay attention and truly become engaged in learning when they want to know something, not when the teacher says it is time for them to know something.

RESOURCES

Reinventing Schools’ A New Model for Education,
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/techgap/newmodel.html.

Technology and Education Reform: Technical Research Report - August 1995, Executive
Summary, http://www.ed.gov/pubs/SER/Technology/execsum.html.

The Failure and the Promise of Technology in Education, Al Rogers, Global SchoolNet
Foundation, http://www.gsn.org/teach/articles/promise.html.

Computers for Learning, http://www.computers.fed.gov/.

Engines for Education’s Solving the Testing Problem,
http://www.ils.nwu.edu/~e_for_e/nodes/NODE-70-pg.html.

Reinventing Schools’ The Nintendo Generation,
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/techgap/nintendo.html.

Characteristics of Effective Student Web Projects,
http://www.gsn.org/web/charact/index.htm.

Schoolhouse Tech,
http://www.feedmag.com/html/dialog/97.04dialog/97.04dialog1.html.

Engines for Education’s Example of Natural vs. Formal Learning,
http://www.ils.nwu.edu/~e_for_e/nodes/NODE-48-pg.html.