If you listen to teachers who talk frankly about their profession—and we have, for about a decade now at Voxitatis—you will discover that what they really want, in terms of technology, is not a cool website that teaches the same material they go over in class.
Rather, they want technology to reinforce what they do in the classroom with their real students. That is, they want technology to have the effect of a teacher’s aide or teacher’s assistant.
A typical job description for a teacher’s assistant, found on the website for the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, might include the following:
- Reinforce lessons presented by teachers by reviewing material with students one-on-one or in small groups
- Enforce school and class rules to help teach students proper behavior
- Help teachers with recordkeeping, such as tracking attendance and calculating grades
- Help teachers prepare for lessons by getting materials ready or setting up equipment, such as computers
- Supervise students in class, between classes, during lunch and recess, and on field trips
Let’s consider each of these general duties one at a time.
Reinforce lessons, review material one-on-one
This includes drilling students, which practice sites like IXL, listed on the Illinois State Board of Education’s website, can easily provide. It also includes sites like the Khan Academy that present material in different terms for anyone who wants to learn.
We present these sites here in order to make our coverage as comprehensive as possible, but Voxitatis in no way endorses them. And while they may be available on the Internet, they are not free. In Illinois alone, during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2011, The Rock Falls Elementary School District #13 reported paying IXL a sum total of $4,200. That’s just one district. Illinois has 860 districts, and while not every one of them made payments to IXL, District 13 is not the state’s largest district. IXL got plenty of money from tax dollars, believe me.
This is the biggest reason Voxitatis developed Answer Maryland: it’s free. We don’t ask schools for money, we don’t ask students for money, and we don’t ask teachers for money, just for participation. All the system resources are available for free.
Human resources, on the other hand, if teachers want us to actually grade student writing, are a different story. We have to pay people for their time. But the use of Answer Maryland doesn’t require us to provide grades for student assignments. We’re all just part of a big community, and it doesn’t cost any money.
Enforce school and class rules, behavior control
No pretending. We can’t help with this one, and I seriously doubt any piece of technology will be able to enforce school rules or control student behavior. We throw our hands up in the air and move on to the next topic.
Help with recordkeeping, grading
Technology can play a big role here, and I’m not just talking about keeping a record of your grades in a spreadsheet. There are well designed systems, some of which run on the Web, some that run on a laptop or even an iPad, that can help you keep track of classroom records and calculate student grades.
But there are also sites like those used by many teachers who participate in the national Write-a-Novel Month of November. The organization reported a total collective word count for 2011 from participating classrooms of 3,074,963,630. Whew! That’s a lot of writing, and nothing keeps track of it better than a computer.
Help teachers prepare, materials, computers
This is where Answer Maryland really shines. We have developed a series of math demos, similar to this one allowing students to compare up to four fractions using fraction bars. We also have one using four circle graphs. These demos we created are open-source, which means, we don’t expect them to be in their final forms as we have published them.
We have programmed a foundation that is functional and will allow students to play with the various math subjects in a trial-and-error fashion. But we don’t want it to end there. Rather, we hope teachers will take it from here. Do you think it would be better in all one color? Just change the program to use the color you want. Do you want to write all the numbers in word form? Go ahead. Make it fit whatever situation you have with your students. Your only limit is your creativity.
But you have to get involved. We can’t do everything for you, but here’s a base you can start with. And then, when you’ve written a few programs, share them with the rest of the community, and let other teachers apply their own modifications to your design. Who knows? You might even like it better. And if not, just don’t tell your kids about it.
Supervise students on field trips, during lunch
We can’t do this one, either. Sorry.
Demonstrated desire for assistants in classrooms
We will often hear of teacher wishlists, things they wish they could have. When we interviewed Annice Brave, Illinois’s Teacher of the Year for 2011, she gave us her wishlist, which included the following:
- Have infinite patience for the children who need to have patience consistently modeled for them to examine
- Have boundless love for students who will test to see how long love lasts and when anger will erupt
- Have bottomless checkbooks to provide adequate nutrition, clothing, and the little extras for kids to help them fit in with their peers
- Have a never-ending supply of “just the right thing” to say when a child is wounded and feels that no one cares
- Have classrooms that are true “Palaces of Knowledge” where every student has the latest technology and supplies to get a first-class education
- Have classes filled with diverse students who not only learn together but learn from each other’s experiences
- Live in a world where people show love for children by adequately funding needed programs to provide a great upbringing for all children
- Have the respect of their communities for the knowledge, love, and respect they bring to their students
But often, teachers have more practical things in mind. Take the words of Karen Lewis, the Chicago Teacher Union president, who said last year, upon learning that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel would be sending his kids to the University of Chicago Lab School and paying the annual tuition (for high school students) of $24,870. She said it was “wonderful” that Emanuel has the option to choose a school with small class sizes, vibrant curriculum, and a teacher and an assistant in every classroom.
Clearly, Ms. Lewis was holding up the idea of a teacher assistant in every classroom as a positive thing for schools, even though not all schools could afford such a luxury.
We don’t just hear from teachers, though, about the benefits of an assistant in every classroom; we also hear from parents, such as in this testimonial from the blogosphere: “Class size is small and with the an assistant in every classroom, the kids get all the individual attention they need to be successful,” wrote one website guest about the Montessori Day School in Phoenix, Ariz.
And we hear from state departments of education. North Carolina, the first state in the country to make sure every classroom had an assistant, posted the following statement of pride to its official website: “In the 1970s, the State Board was involved in the beginning of many major educational initiatives. … North Carolina became the first state with a teacher and a teacher assistant in every classroom in kindergarten through third grade.”
Schools hold fundraising drives with the sole objective of putting an assistant in every classroom, such as PS 166 (The Richard Rogers School of Arts and Technology) in Manhattan: “The fundraising goal for the Classroom Assistants Program is to raise sufficient funds to place an assistant in every classroom in every grade. Donations are needed early in the school year to support the timely hiring of these invaluable classroom helpers.”
So, teacher assistants are “invaluable” and helpful. And although technology will never replace real teachers or assistants, schools can use technology in the open-source way we programmed it to bring many of the duties of a teacher assistant into every classroom. We hope this will allow schools that can’t afford to spend another dime where it’s not helping to prepare for state tests or the Common Core, get the same kind of individualized attention technology, especially social media, can provide.
The best news: it’s free. It’s free of advertising, and we invite you to hop on board, no matter what state you live and teach in.
We know teacher assistants are very important in younger grades, as we hear from the Westside Academy in Milwaukee (“Some benefits of this program include a full-time educational assistant in every classroom”), but the assistance of good technology, where we’re not out to sell you or your students anything, can be valuable at any grade level.
