This week, I was thrilled to find the original ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book series still selling online.  My nephew’s birthday is around the corner, and they will make a wonderful gift for the strong reader he is becoming.  You may have already seen the  concept revamped as a Youtube video remix.  I was thrilled to see Jackie Frens working on these year ago.  Check out her blog for resources on that task (and so so so much more).

The heart and soul of technology integration is about harnessing our love for stories.

So often we get caught up in ‘top ten best apps,’ or ‘standards for classroom technology’ links that we forget what our tools are about in essence: to tell, share, and find stories for a new generation.

ePortfolios, blogs, podcasts, GarageBand, and Youtube are all about amplifying our stories.  As I type this post, I am nearly done reading the fantastic book:

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation by Tim Brown

“The best and most successful experience brands have a number of things in common that may provide us with some secure guidelines. First, a successful experience requires active consumer participation. Second, a customer experience that feels authentic, genuine, and compelling is likely to be delivered by employees operating within an experience culture themselves.”

Do phrases like ” we need to engage our students” and “the first step towards motivating kids is building buy in” hint at dysfunctional power relationship between students and teachers?  Are they just further evidence of our reluctance to give students the chance to own their own learning?  When we see engaging students as our ultimate goal, are we somehow suggesting that teachers are the only ones that can determine topics worth exploring?

What story does the technology at your school tell? Is it a story based on fear, or a story steeped in believing and trusting that students will impress and amaze us?

The stories that shape us engage our empathy and creativity, and that empowers our behavior as learning designers. Coming back to Tim Brown’s book, we are able to imagine the imagery involved at a school or classroom evoking the storyteller’s mindset:

“To find out whether a company is optimistic, experimental, and attuned to risk, people should simply use their senses: look for a colorful landscape of messy disorder rather than a suburban grid of tidy beige cubicles. Listen for bursts of raucous laughter rather than the constant drone of subdued conversation.”

In Steven Spielberg’s 2016 Harvard University commencement address, he leaves the graduating class with his thoughts on the power of story:

So to me, this means we all have to tell our own stories. We have so many stories to tell. Talk to your parents and your grandparents, if you can, and ask them about their stories. And I promise you, like I have promised my kids, you will not be bored.

Our best, most advanced tools tell stories, and provide us with access to a multitude of narratives.  When we talk about ‘technology integration.’ what we are actually talking about is yet another shift in the storytelling tradition.  The closer you look at ‘digital citizenship’ the more you realize we aren’t talking about skills apart from our humanity, but skills that are involved in all relationship dynamics.

So much of our discomfort with technology is because we mislead each other by describing it in terms meant to distort the lens through which we see it.  Technology is not about gadgetry, devices, apps, or platforms.  Technology is about weaving connections, and cross stitching new serials.

The way films look —it started with old 35mm motion picture cameras, to color with the three-strip Technicolor, to cameras that weighed hundreds of pounds and had to be on dollies and cranes — that was the film grammar of the day.

Then, we came to lighter cameras, to handheld cameras, steady cams, and on and on, all the way down to now.

There’s a unique thing to a GoPro.

There’s a unique thing to an iPhone — the way things are shot and the way it’s held. It just gives it a vibrancy you’ve never been able to have before.

I believe new film grammar is going to come from these things.

(See John Lasseter’s full piece via Medium here)

Many movie-goers love the ways technology has brought the film industry forward.  Those steps are not unlike the way technology is revamping the narrative of ‘school.’

If we see our students, teachers, and administrators as authentic storytellers, and we make time for them to share their stories, perhaps we can move away from checklists about software competencies, and instead revise the entire dialogue around our tools. The time to stop asking teachers what their favorite apps are is here.  Instead, start asking them: What stories will you spark today?

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Story via Flickr