Member Profiles
Improving the World Around Us with Each Passing Day
Kevin Jarrett, a technology facilitator in Northfield, New Jersey, can thank Twitter for his favorite ed tech moment. It involved a not-so-tech-savvy teacher, an amazing professional learning network, a great new tool, and a room full of seventh grade language arts students two weeks away from summer vacation.
The teacher, Noel Tobiasen, approached Jarrett last spring asking for a tool to help her students build websites for a unit on young adult novels. She wanted something simple, powerful, and easy for everyone to use. Jarrett recommended Wix.com, a website-building tool he learned about from a teacher in Colorado via Twitter.
A week later, Tobiasen stopped Jarrett in the hall to rave about the projects that her kids had created, and she invited him to her classroom to take a look.
"I was blown away!" Jarrett recalls. "It was the next to last week of school and the lab full of students was buzzing with activity. The students had built incredibly intricate websites with original writing, stunning graphics, and amazing interactive features, and none of them had ever designed a website before."
Tobiasen merely explained what she wanted on the sites, introduced the students to the tool, and then got out of the way, Jarrett says. "This is a great example of a phrase my friend and colleague Gary Stager often uses: 'Less us, more them.' "
Tobiasen said that even her most reticent learners became completely engrossed in their projects, continuing to work on them at home and proudly displaying them to their parents.
"The students controlled the process from start to finish," Jarrett says. "No one asked the teacher for assistance. Students helped each other or found the answers they needed online. The teacher simply created an environment in which the students were free to express their creativity in the context of the assigned curriculum. It was epic!"
Just five years into his teaching career, Jarrett is an ed tech junkie who relies on his Twitter network of thousands for educational resources, news, information, and research. He follows teacher-leaders, forward-thinking district administrators, renowned social media experts, education industry thought-leaders, government officials, and many more.
In the classroom, his favorite tool is the wiki.
"Wikis facilitate global collaborations better than almost any other ed tech tool," Jarrett says. "They are easy to use, incredibly flexible, can be secure and private or open to the world, and, of course, they are completely free."
He joined ISTE shortly after he started teaching in 2004. "I knew ISTE would connect me to other teachers around the world and improve my professional practice. Both have absolutely been the case," he says.
Jarrett, who left a career in IT professional services and consulting to pursue his dream job of teaching, says he's hopeful about the future.
"Technology is evolving faster than ever before—bringing people together, eliminating barriers, facilitating understanding and knowledge transfer, and improving the world around us with each passing day," he says.
Education is changing so rapidly, and there's never been a better time to be an educator, he says.
"It's heartening to hear state and national leaders expressing some of the things ed tech leaders have said for years, most notably that we can't prepare students for their future using tools and techniques from our past."
Copyright © 2009, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), 1.800.336.5191 (U.S. & Canada) or 1.541.302.3777 (Int’l), iste@iste.org, www.iste.org. All rights reserved.
Learning & Leading with Technology | November 2009
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