As part of a very competitive grant process for technology that Gateway was fortunate enough to be awarded, the district was given three slots to attend a major tech conference last week. This two-day conference, attended by Chris Parker, Wendy Long and myself, focused on how technology can influence change in the educational process, particularly on personalizing learning. With a wide range of keynote speakers, vendors, educational experts, technology innovators, and educators the conference explored the vast distance already covered by technological innovations and the enormous potential for change moving forward. The LearnLaunch “Across Bounderies” conference was held at the Harvard Business School in Cambridge.
The major reason for attending was that DESE requested that schools funded though the “Digital Connections” grant come to the conference for a partnership meeting to review success to date, plan for upcoming activities, and share potential future activities within both the current partner schools and with those schools getting funding in the next grant cycle. As you may recall, Gateway used these funds to upgrade and improve our Wi-Fi coverage to ensure ubiquitous internet accessibility throughout our schools. This helps to support many activities including our Chromebook project, required state testing, and the use of existing computers and devices in our classrooms.
As we found out at this meeting, Gateway continues to be well advanced in providing technology resources, especially in a cost efficient way, to our staff and students. What we learned was that most schools involved in this grant project have similar concerns about providing enough staff development time and resources to fully integrate technology into our pedagogy, thereby limiting technology’s potential impact on personalizing learning for our students.
It was both exciting and scary to listen to presentations on the continuing changes in education related to changing demographics, the rate of change in the workplace impacting future career opportunities, ongoing problems with motivating and engaging students, and the relatively few schools being showcased that have truly moved the needle on student engagement and personalized learning. As we heard several times, the push for personalized learning—especially related to project-based learning across the curriculum—is often seen as at odds with the standardized testing that even the new ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) continues to push as the measurement of student and school success. This Ying and Yang of educational philosophy seems to echo the historic breach between “whole child” learning (also embracing 21st Century Skills) and the push to standardize curriculum and testing on standardized measures only in English language arts and mathematics. While this remains a daunting challenge, it was helpful to hear about programs that seemed to be bridging this gap and motivating to talk with students and staff members presenting their ‘Classrooms of the Future’ at this conference.
While Gateway has put our toes in the water with some of our activities, it appears we still have much further to go. Perhaps as we convene our own “Gateway 2025” process, we’ll get some input into how we can move forward with ways to better engage students through personalized learning to meet student needs in a world that seems to change faster each day.
