UNITE Team At LVJUSD: Link Between Technology And Classrooms

From LVJUSD: There is a wave of technology in the day-to-day lives of students, who are growing up in a time of ubiquitous devices and apps competing for their attention. At the Livermore Valley Joint Unified School District (LVJUSD), the UNITE team wants to ensure that education rides the wave rather than being swept up in it.

UNITE stands for Utilizing New and Innovative Technology in Education. The group of Tech Specialists who make up the UNITE team spend their time at elementary school sites educating teachers as well as students. Julie Janzen, Noah King, Ravi Prabhala, and Michelle Seugling – teachers on special assignment – use their classroom visits to provide students with a solid foundation in using technology as a tool in their education, and do so by showing teachers how to use it themselves. Their role in the district is to establish connections between students, teachers, and technology. “We want to be the link for teachers between problems and solutions,” said Prabhala, Integrated Technology Specialist at LVJUSD. “We want to get teachers comfortable using tech on their own; we should empower teachers to empower students in that area.”

In a lesson implementing a green screen, Seugling kept the classroom teacher close by as she recorded student reports with an iPad, and after a few minutes, handed it off. Seugling’s goal for the students is the same for their teacher – that they acclimate themselves to implementing technology naturally in their education.

Something united is greater than the sum of its parts. Teachers are already experts in content; the teacher with whom Seugling was working applied her lesson on California regions to the green screen project. The members of the UNITE team are experts in technology, keeping up with innovations and finding the right place for tech in the classroom, and they bring a philosophy of collaborative learning. In bringing together these experts in different facets of education, students see a model of critical thinking, collaboration, and collective problem solving – an organic process of learning evolving before their eyes.

“It should be more interesting to students to effectively integrate tech into all tasks,” said Prabhala. “A computer should not look to them like just a testing device or just a gaming platform.” Instead, students are gaining exposure to computers and the internet as tools that they can learn to wield responsibly and with purpose. For example, in a transitional kindergarten class, King introduced students to a Teachable Machine website through Google that allowed them to train the computer to recognize faces and produce a sound effect, a GIF, or synthesized voice saying their names. “It was a foundational lesson in the basics of coding,” said King. “It shows them that they can control a computer by giving it input and specifying output.”

Just as learning to read and write allows any person to engage in the body of human knowledge, learning to interact with technology empowers students to engage with the devices and the internet as active agents rather than passive consumers – what the UNITE team calls Creation over Consumption. In a lesson with Janzen, students worked with Raspberry Pi devices – small, single-board computers – to discover that they can have precise control over programs and the computer itself, down to the hardware. By attaching LEDs to a circuit they hooked up to their devices, and with the Python programming language, students found that they had the ability to produce a real-world application (causing lights to flash, in this case) with a little code and knowledge of how all of the pieces fit together.

Putting the pieces together, and showing everyone how they can, too, is the UNITE team’s specialty. They understand that incorporating technology into a classroom or a lesson plan involves a learning curve, and so they live in that curve. They work to bring together what is being learned, how it is taught, and the right tools to enhance that process for both the student and the teacher. As confidence in the technology increases on both sides of the classroom, ultimately Prabhala hopes there will be a shift to a more personal initiative in learning on the part of students. This way, students will become more accountable for generating their own information, and teachers will be able to act as facilitators who can suggest resources and interact with student work in real time.

As LVJUSD schools update their infrastructures to accommodate the new tools of 21st century education, more and more devices are being brought into classrooms, and their applications are limited only by the scope of what the students and teachers understand to be possible. The UNITE team is expanding that scope every day, and ensuring that they will produce a tech-literate generation that understands its potential and responsibility – an educated digital citizenry that actively works together to discover innovative solutions to global problems. The words spoken by a fourth grader during a UNITE-led lesson, which may as well serve the team’s mantra, suggest the group is on the right track.

“I have an idea,” she said to her partner, typing out code. “Let’s try this.”

Images Via Livermore Schools