Online Education Needs Innovation

Digital media expert, author and educational innovator Nicole Dreiske addresses innovations in education as school districts face challenges transitioning to online learning in response to COVID-19. Informatics LifeLine posed the following questions:

Many school districts are opting to teach only online because of the pandemic. Beyond just the problems of hardware and software, what do you think is their biggest challenge to successfully switching to online education?

Across America, students endured three months of patched together remote learning (or homeschooling during quarantine followed by 2.5 months of summer break. It’s a perfect storm of educational challenges. Recovering from summer learning loss was always a challenge for teachers.  That challenge is now compounded by months of quarantine and a big break from structured school environments.Teachers are going to need new and more effective ways to deal with behavioral issues, self-regulation issues and focusing deficits.  

What is your concept of the digital divide and how will the divide affect the challenge the schools face in using online education?

Schools and districts are already allocating huge resources to the digital divide, and to helping teachers get comfortable with technology. Here’s the hidden problem: children and youth in the 21st century now spend more than 1,600 hours per year looking at screens. Whether they’re on social media, watching videos, or playing video games, kids are habituated to using screens for entertainment and to distract themselves.

In an all-digital classroom, this becomes a major issue, as children simply don’t have the patience or self-control to look at a screen for educational purposes for long periods of time. This is the elephant in the e-learning room. Even if teachers become experts at using Zoom and designing new, visually appealing lessons for the class projects, they need ways to replicate the immediacy and energy of the in person classroom.Further, they need the confidence and energy to know that they can engage students at a distance. 

What kinds of changes to teaching content,size of class, methods of interaction will they need to make to make online teaching work?

My organization, the ICMC, transferred all its programs to remote learning and worked with almost 30 classrooms online just after the pandemic started. From my experience, content and direct instruction have to be shorter and class sizes need to be smaller in order for online education to work. Methodologies and lesson plans need to incorporate student interaction, visual learning and visual literacy.

Children are visual learners, so theoretically, using digital devices for education should be a benefit not a deterrent. But we need to remember that they've been using their digital devices primarily for entertainment. To get them to cross the bridge into using screens for education, they need better focus and they need quick kinesthetic connectors that present as FUN.

Most importantly, to keep students focused, the approaches need to need to engage both the brain and the body. And they need to do this seamlessly. For effective e-learning of all kinds, students need kinesthetic/physical activity to support their intellectual and academic efforts. 

This dual design needs to employ innovative approaches such as used in the ICMC curriculum. Combined brain and body approaches are the key to our broad success with diverse learners, ELL students, as well as mainstream and gifted. 

If you were advising school districts in preparing for switching to online education, what would you advise the districts, the teachers and the parents to do to make the experience successful for the students.

Be open to adopting innovative learning methodologies. ICMC field-tested its programs and pedagogies for nine years in more than a dozen of Chicago’s most challenged schools. These methodologies have been the subject of my book, and been presented  to the NAEYC, ICAAP, the Novus Summit at the UN and, soon, TEDx Chicago.

Let me give some examples of what I mean by innovative technologies. ICMC developed Fast FOCUS! as an in-service workshop for early childhood and elementary school educators.

In Fast FOCUS! I teach techniques that teachers  can use to diffuse disruptions, jump-start e-learning and re-engage students in a matter of seconds.  These approaches have been taught to more than 3,600 educators and 500,000 students, with high levels of success.

Why are such approaches effective?. There’s a lot of research showing that exercise and physical activity drive brain function, particularly in two studies by the National Institutes of Health.  One is called “Exercise is Brain Food” and the other “Exercise and Children’s Intelligence Cognition and Academic Achievement.” So we give educators fast, fun, portable activities that teachers and students and parents can do anywhere or anytime, without losing valuable instruction time. 

These techniques include the use of  super-fast micro-movements, hand play, and articulation activities that raise kids’ energy and engagement and unify classroom focus. For example, hand play can be high energy, or it can be really concentrated like yoga for the fingers.  

Using these very brief exercises means that a mini-break becomes an extension of the lesson, rather than a detour. Fast FOCUS! techniques improve students’ connection to the remote learning without taking time away from the lessons teachers have planned. Plus, 90% of children demonstrate stronger self regulation and high engagement after using these movements.

In Screen Smart® you can see the full e-learning system at work.  Before every session, we  “prime the mind” for accelerated learning with Fast FOCUS! techniques.   We then engage children in close analysis of short narrative media, using a technique called “Pause and Question.”   During Pause and Question and we drill down into literacy and social emotional learning with questions like, “How do you think that character is feeling? What evidence are we seeing on the screen?” After just a few Screen Smart® sessions,  60% of PreK and 80% of Kindergarten through 2nd grade students demonstrate dramatic improvement in using inferential reasoning, empathy and critical thinking.

When you put the kinesthetic/physical tools together with the intellectual/academic curriculum, you don’t just turbo charge learning, you supercharge it.

Someday the pandemic will be over. Do you think that online education will still be heavily used? How do you see its future?

Colleges and high schools will continue to use online education, and specific parts of remote learning will be retained.  Moving forward, I think we need to integrate the human and physical components into our thinking about all e-learning. Being surrounded by extraordinary advances in AI and robotics and computer technology, doesn’t mean that we, humans,  are of less value than those devices we’ve created.

That’s a fiction, and one we have every right and responsibility to reject.

Exponential advances in technology do not mean that we or our children have any LESS potential, or brilliance.  We still cultivate the power of human technology, of our brains, our bodies, our beings.If we are going to fully inhabit the “tech space” we need to honor and develop our human technology alongside electronic technology. 

Given today's challenges , school systems need to be bold in adopting new techniques such as Fast FOCUS and Screen Smart®  to teach children to engage technology in ways that are empowering instead of disempowering – and in ways that are productive, beneficial and respectful of their human development.