October is Month of the Young Adolescent (MOYA), a time to celebrate the skills and accomplishments of 10 to 15-year-olds while focusing on the unique needs of this age group. During these years when young bodies and minds are changing rapidly, educators must be mindful of providing academically rigorous learning while supporting the developmental and social needs of the middle level student.

This We Believe: Successful Schools for Young Adolescents, the foundational position paper of National Middle School Association (NMSA), describes the characteristics that such schools must exhibit. Among the recommendations are that learning must be relevant, challenging, integrative, exploratory, collaborative, and active. Students must be able to see how subjects are connected and how learning is connected to their lives. They must be led to use critical and higher order thinking skills and experience a variety of teaching methods. I can think of no better way to address these needs than through the use of technology and media!

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Last year I posted an article here at Media Infusion called “4 Weeks to a Flatter You.” The theme of the post was that the world is indeed becoming smaller as Thomas Friedman suggested in The World is Flat, and I provided a 4-week regimen to help teachers prepare themselves with skills necessary for constructing 21st Century classrooms. This year, I’d like to follow up that article on “Web 2.0 Self-improvement” with tools for “Web 2.0 Us-improvement.” I’ve put together another 4-week course to help us move further along the journey. We’ll examine the idea of how — because of the Internet — culture (and business) is changing through crowdsourcing and how we can take advantage of this phenomenon to transform and democratize our classrooms.

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Imagine that you are a high school junior. You sit in nervous anticipation with your classmates in a crowded auditorium filled with almost 2,000 people. They have come with one purpose in mind: to see your homework.

You reflect upon all of the painstaking labor you have put into your project. You remember that moment, like it was frozen in time, when the kernel of an idea started to form far back in the recesses of your mind. The excitement built as you started to assemble the pieces. You were challenged to conceptualize, plan, synthesize, develop, and build your masterpiece from the ground up. As a student, you began to take ownership in your education. You became engaged in the learning process. Oh yes, there were challenges along the way. However, now that you think about it, those were the life experiences that forced you to learn the most.

Now you sit, anxiously waiting to see and hear the audience’s reaction to your work. Thousands of people have come to cheer you on and celebrate your achievements. The lights dim, and the show begins.

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As a high school teacher of more than ten years and a 2005 Milken Educator Award winner, I have been asked to share my thoughts on using technology to close the achievement gap. There are many achievement “gaps” we could explore: the gap between students in different racial categories, the gap between have and have-not students, or the gap between genders. These gaps have some things in common and some specific differences. While this blog will concentrate on how we try to use technology and media at my high school, HighTechHigh-Los Angeles, to engage our students and close those gaps, I am excited to learn from you about the interesting ways you are using information technology in your classrooms, schools, districts and states.

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Identity positions can raise difficult questions that often cannot be answered easily or comfortably in the classroom. Thankfully, the journey of finding out who you are, or of assigning one or many identities to yourself, is a constructive activity that can make students aware of how they group people and make judgments from those categorizations. As I categorize myself over and over, I realize others are doing it too, students, teachers, everyone.

If someone were to ask me today “Who are you?” or “How do you define yourself?” I would have about ten different responses. Sometimes I consider the current stage of my life and other times I give more weight to the state of my career or even my mood on a particular day. When someone asks me how I define myself or what my identity is, I realize that although I define myself a particular way, it is still my outward appearance that determines how other people read me. And like most people, my understanding of my identity is contingent on how others perceive me. So while I may be a teacher or a mother, a Midwesterner or an American, I am identified more readily by physical characteristics and, in particular, my race.

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When I asked the 7th graders to write about their goals for our summer program for at-risk English Learners, I expected something along the lines of “Get better at reading,” or “Learn more math.” Marco, who arrived in Houston from Cuba one day before the program began, wrote one line: “Yo quiero triunfar en este país” (“I want to triumph in this country”). It struck me then that English Learners’ first experience of a foreign language and a foreign culture is deeply shaped by their first experience of school. A teacher’s responsibility is weighty enough — I still think back on my first-year class of 4th graders and hope that they somehow made it in life despite my first-year fumbling. How much weightier it is for those of us who teach kindergartners from China, 8th graders from Mexico, and high-school students from Afghanistan.

We know that, on one hand, our students need the same thing from us that all kids need from their teacher — the new three R’s, rigor, relevance, and relationship, augmented by the fourth R that my friends who teach art and music remind me to include: richness. My 2nd graders, all born in either Mexico or the Marshall Islands, need a rigorous curriculum in math, science, and every other subject — even those kids who are still in the silent stage. They need a curriculum that’s relevant to their lives — and while a unit on “El Día de los Muertos” is great, sometimes a unit on Pokemon or Dragonball-Z is more relevant. They need that often-dismissed but essential relationship with a caring adult, who will respect them and listen to them. And they need richness — immersion in all the color and passion of literary and artistic works, some that reflect their culture and some that are as foreign to me as to them.

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In 2005, Thomas Friedman’s book, The World Is Flat, sent a wake up call to the United States, with a message of particular urgency for educators: We must stop preparing our students for careers that will no longer exist for them in the 21st Century.

Our country no longer occupies a role of dominance in the global economy, with little competition, as it has for the past 50 or so years. The playing field has been “flattened” due to such forces as the Internet, and any job that can be automated or outsourced will be.

We are training our students for an unknown future, having little idea of what jobs will exist when they graduate college. What we do know is that they will have to compete globally and at a higher level than the market calls for now. Any job that can be automated or outsourced will be, and what will remain are those jobs/tasks that need specialization that can’t be found elsewhere or can only be done by a “localized touch,” rather than the long arm of overseas, cheaper labor.

Welcome to the Flat World! Fasten your seatbelts: it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

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Who was your favorite teacher? If you’re like me, this question is an easy one to answer. As I think back over my career as a learner, from elementary school through high school, and including college and graduate school, I can quickly conjure the names and faces of my very best teachers. Great teachers stand out. They’re memorable. And whether our contact with them is brief or sustained, their impact lasts a lifetime.

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