We Don't Need An App to Support Teacher Expertise
3 min read
While the goals of the American Federation of Teachers collaboration with Clever and ShareMyLesson remain unclear (to me, anyways), if the AFT or the National Education Association wants to increase the technological expertise of their members, they don't need an app for that. Between the 1.6 million members of the AFT, and the nearly 3 million NEA members, both organizations clearly have technological, pedagogical, and training expertise within their current membership.
If AFT and NEA want to support their members in becoming more effective at using online tools, rather than focusing on applications, why not shift the focus onto asking good questions - the types of open ended questions that drive learning, with or without technology?
Either AFT or NEA could pull a team of 100-300 technology and subject level experts from within their ranks in a heartbeat. If this group of educators was given financial support by their unions to work on creating trainings and documenting best practice for tech integration, OER authoring, privacy assessments, etc, they could have some solid material assembled over the course of a school year. If needed, unions could also pay for outside facilitators to help drive and direct the process - and over the course of the year, or perhaps as a year two follow up, some of the participants could also receive training as facilitators, so that they could support trainings for more members locally.
Using this process, at the end of one year, either AFT or NEA could have member-created materials documenting best practice for tech integration, open content use, privacy assessment, and other subjects as needed. These materials could be released under a Creative Commons license to support ongoing reuse and improvement at the local level.
At the end of year two, the documents created in year one could be revised and improved based on use and feedback. Additionally, union members could have received training as facilitators to help drive this process in other schools to support other union members.
This approach empowers union members with information and experience, and honors their expertise. It also provides a foundation upon which other members can build. It does not require any external vendor support, and because the emphasis is on skills first and specific technologies second, the material should be flexible enough to adapt as technology evolves.
As a final thought here, in reference specifically to one of the "benefits" of the collaboration with Clever - single sign on across multiple applications - it's still worth asking about the nature of the problem being solved. Remembering multiple logins is a real issue, but the question remains: is multiple logins the actual problem, or a symptom? In an EdTech ecosystem trained to see learning delivered via apps, the "answer" to most any problem will be a technology. But, if the technology has proliferated to the point where a class can't function due to too many logins, the problem might be bad planning and poor pedagogy. Single sign on won't solve that.
