TECHNOS—Michael Hutchison

July 27, 2008

Michael Hutchison

“What I find, in general, is that giving kids the opportunity to work with technology gives them the opportunity…to get a new perspective on what they’re learning. And that’s a real positive thing.”

Michael Hutchison is a social studies teacher at Lincoln High School in Vincennes, Indiana. A teacher since 1978, Mr. Hutchison was named Teacher of Year (Central US region) by Technology and Learning magazine in 1999 and Indiana Computer Educator of the Year in 2002. He is also the 2006 Indiana Council for the Social Studies (ICSS) Special Service Award winner. He takes his students on electronic field trips where they’ve learned about V-E Day, Ellis Island, the United Nations, and the Civil War. As a member of the national PBS TeacherSource Advisory Group, he has written curricula to accompany PBS series such as Ken Burns’ The Civil War and Well-founded Fear. Mr. Hutchison is a teacher-moderator in the field of social studies for TappedIn, an online professional development resource for educators. He oversees two listservs for teachers who are interested in using technology to enhance their learning opportunities and those of their students. We talked to Michael Hutchison in April to ask him about his experiences with technology and teaching.

T.: How do you assess the state of technology, especially its use and availability, in schools today?

M.H.: Personally, I’d like to see a little more availability of computer technology, especially software, in our classrooms. We use Microsoft Word® here, so I can use it, but the students don’t have access to it. A lot of what I do, I try to build it around what I know is available here at school. One of the problems we have is that we have very few functioning computer labs. The project I did on the Civil War in 2003 was done in our school media center, which has only 36 machines. Our student population was over 900 at that point. After that, I was out of the classroom for two years, when I did technology support in the district. Because of budget cuts, that position was ended and I came back to the classroom.

Is it your preference to teach?

Yes. It was nice to be away for a little while, and to be honest, doing the technology support was what I thought I wanted to do at the time. But being in tech support gave me a lot of insight that I would not have had otherwise. For example, I had never worked in an elementary school setting before, and during those two years as tech support, I worked with several elementary level teachers, and that gave me a good idea of what conditions are like there, compared to the high school level, where I had taught.

I’m seeing more teachers embrace technology, which is good. But, sometimes I see people feeling a bit overwhelmed with it. They want to use it, but they wonder what they’ll do if the technology doesn’t work—they say, “I’ve never done this before, and how do I pass it on to the kids, if I don’t know how?” The best I can explain how I feel about it is that I’m basically self-taught. When I graduated from college, the biggest technology question for us was, how do I thread a 16-mm film projector.

Those were the Good Old Days!

Right! Or, “How do I make a transparency?” Computers were mystical machines that we had no clue at all about how they worked because we never saw them. Now, it’s entirely different. I think more and more teachers will embrace it. The last project I did in class, I had to do very little teaching as far as having to tell the kids how to use the computer or how to do a PowerPoint® project—because the students I had already knew that. And to be honest, as a social studies teacher, that’s what I have to look at: I like the technology, but I want them to learn American History first. That’s my No. 1 goal.

Does technology enhance the study of social studies?

Absolutely. Of course, I think I’m a little prejudiced because I don’t teach any subjects other than social studies, but you can link technology with social studies more so than with any other subject area. If I were an English teacher or a science teacher, I suppose I’d find the links, but it just seems that there’s so much out there that is social studies related.

You’re talking about the resources that are available through technology.

Yes. And a good number of those are free on the Web. When I was at the ICSS conference in March in Indianapolis, I did a session where I was in the auditorium in the hotel where the conference was being held, and I was interacting with Leni Donlan, who is the coordinator of the Learning Page for the Library of Congress [LOC] in Washington, D.C. We were doing a live session in which she was showing my group the resources that were available for use in their classrooms from the LOC—that’s a really powerful thing, and it’s all free.

Are you able to do those real-time sessions in your classrooms with your students?

We haven’t done much of that. The reason is that the portal I was using for that conference was an online community for teachers called Tapped In. It lends itself more to professional development. Not that I have never used Tapped In with students; I have on occasion. But again, I think probably the unavailability of lab space makes it more difficult for me at school. Also, there’s the issue of not only using the live discussion with students but also how to use Tapped In, which isn’t really “chat” in the true sense of the word—to use it in the classroom, the kids need training, and I’d rather not do it that way.

So, mostly you’re using the technology for teacher professional development, not so much for learning purposes for students?

I would say half and half. When I came back from my two years as tech support, I started teaching four sections of first semester World History, which I hadn’t done for about 20 years—so it took me a little while to jump back into it all, to brush up on the subject matter. Generally, I’ll use technology everyday for instruction. Now, whether or not the kids have it, hands-on, that’s another story. For example: I do all my lecture notes by PowerPoint, and I use United Streaming for video just about every day in class. The downside of all this is the lack of availability of machines [computers] in our classrooms. I have my teacher workstation, and I have three pretty ancient other computers…so if I have a class of 25 students, it’s difficult. We do a lot with primary source materials that we find online, some of the things I’ve done for PBS, for instance.

Just curious: How did you hook up with PBS?

I had just been a regional winner for Technology and Learning’s Teacher of the Year Program, back in 1999, and in early 2000 I was contacted by PBS. They work with people who have done that sort of thing through their Teacher Source, and they asked me if I’d like to write lesson plans for a program called Well-founded Fear, about political asylum. I agreed, and one thing led to another, and they contacted me for other projects. Honestly, I still have a hard time believing that they wanted me to do lessons for Ken Burns’ Civil War—that’s such a powerful program. The other super thing about that, was that I was able to arrange a forum on our social studies teachers’ section of Tapped In, with the help of the PBS station WETA in Washington, D.C., with Ken Burns. I thought there would be no way, but we did it! We did it in prime time for teachers.

What about the technological sophistication of students today, compared to their teachers?

Our kids are into technology a lot…live chat, IM-ing each other, cell phones, etc. But the important thing is that the students are doing what they’re supposed to be doing in the classroom—not text-messaging each other, but doing their classroom work.

I got into teaching during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and at that time, if the teacher was going to show a movie or a videotape, that was a big event. Then, the VCR became ubiquitous, and kids viewed it differently. I think the same thing is true online now. The number of students who have a computer at home is substantially higher than it was when I did my first computer projects in 1995 and ’96. Because of that, kids see the computer as an entirely different thing. The teacher has to keep them on track sometimes.

Does that sophistication about technology on a personal level mean that they’re that much more difficult to stimulate intellectually in the classroom without technology?

No, I don’t think so. I have kids that I can reach with technology, and then there are kids that are much more difficult to reach, no matter what technology is available. Overall, what I find, in general, is that giving kids the opportunity to work with technology gives them the opportunity, not to teach themselves but to get a new perspective on what they’re learning. And I just think that’s a real positive thing. We just finished studying World War II in my class, for example—and I know a lot about it, but for these kids to have the opportunity to see resources firsthand is just wonderful.

Are you seeing any younger teachers coming into the profession with more familiarity with technology?

Yes, I am. And I think the reason for that is because of what is being done on the college level. They’re more required to use educational technology in their coursework in the undergraduate and the graduate levels. They also grew up with it more than you and I did, so they’re more able to embrace it. For example, I teach online classes about teaching social studies using technology, and some of my students are older and aren’t quite comfortable with it yet.

To me, it’s fun to use technology. I wish I could say I use it because it makes my job so much easier, but really, that’s not true. The focus of what I do shifts a lot—so I’m moving around the classroom, and I get a real workout during the day. But to me, that’s fun. I’d rather be doing that than standing in front of the classroom lecturing. I think if you do it right, technology is a wonderful tool for learning. What I dislike immensely is the teachers who use technology more as a reward, to allow kids to take some time off—like letting them play games. Unfortunately, you have a few bad apples in any profession.

Are you having any experience with students using MySpace and FaceBook, or blogging?

My experience is more on a professional development level, rather than with students. We have filtering here at school, so those sites are blocked and the kids don’t have access to it. Although, that’s another thing that kind of bugs me—I know from looking at the media that a lot of the reporting is sensational. It gives educational technology a bad name because the focus isn’t on what teachers are doing with technology that is good. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that there are some teachers who say that computers shouldn’t be used in the classroom because of the abuses that have been reported with MySpace student profiles. On the other hand, I was surprised to learn that some teachers have profiles on MySpace, but they’re a lot younger than I am. Some teachers think it’s a good idea to use MySpace as a teachable moment—to give kids some guidance about how to act online. I guess you could, but you’d better be very, very careful.

I refer to the “f-word”—which for me, is “filtering”—sometimes it’s good because it keeps kids away from those sites they shouldn’t be on, but sometimes it restricts legitimate research.

Tell us about your work with Tapped In.

I was recommended as a resource for someone who was doing her dissertation on teachers using technology in the classroom, and we were put in touch online through Tapped In. I’ve been really lucky in that Tapped In has been very good to me. I’m running three different social studies listservs through them, and they arranged for me to be part of a collaborative learning group at Stanford University. They’ve helped me set up teacher forums, especially the one with Ken Burns about Civil War. Tapped In allowed me to move a social studies teacher listserv of 1,000 people to their site. The Indiana Council for the Social Studies was another listserv that Tapped In set up for us. I do a social studies forum every other week there, so it’s been a good partnership.

What’s your favorite aspect of teaching?

I definitely like the technology end of it. I don’t do as much of it, to be honest, as I wish I could, as far as hands-on with the kids. I guess the best way to do that is to give very kid in the building a computer—and that’s next to impossible for us, because it would just cost too much. Also, we don’t have the lab space.

It’s a really corny thing, but you’ve heard the saying “sage on the stage and guide on the side”—I really like being a guide, and I wish I could do more of that. And what you can’t see is what these kids are like when they’re doing a project—the way they love working together and how excited they are about the work they’re doing. They really love the idea of posting their work online, so their parents, and sometimes their grandparents in other states, can access it. That really gets the kids fired up!

Also, I’ve enjoyed the contacts I’ve been able to make through the work I’ve done, both in the classroom and online. I’ve been lucky to have people who’ve been mentors for me and who’ve encouraged me. That’s been very satisfying. I mean, I never would have thought that I’d be working for PBS, not to mention with Ken Burns—but that’s where teaching has taken me.