Interview with Chris Miller

“Learning is still primarily a social activity, and the use of technology to facilitate that connection among larger groups of people (I think) would really result in an increase in our ability to learn and to impart learning to the students that we serve.”




Click here for a direct link to the MP3.


Chris Miller is a special education teacher at Sanger High School, a rural North Texas school. He is also the go-to technology person on his campus. From hardware troubleshooting and installation to software assistance and technology integration ideas and strategies, Chris is on call for the teachers at the school (and at other schools in the district).

What follows are the compiled notes from the interview. Feel free to comment on this blog, and enjoy the podcast.


Chris's role at Sanger High School
Chris teaches special education; provides support services for students in response intervention model; and assists with instructional technology (webpage, multimedia integration, wiring, etc.) on campus.


About the Students, Faculty, and Staff
Approximately 10-20% of SHS students qualify for the free-and-reduced-lunch program.
The student body is mostly Caucasian, with Hispanics being the largest minority.

There are approximately 60 teachers, 12 support staff, and 10-15 instructional aids.


Student Access to Computers
The campus has three computer labs (not including classrooms for business and multimedia classes); one mobile laptop lab with 25 computers; approximately 2 computers in each classroom; between 4 and 6 computers in each resource classroom; and 6 computers in the content mastery classroom (which serves ESOL/ELL and students with Section 504 services). Computers are also available in the media center for research purposes.


Technology Integration for Administrative Purposes
Sanger ISD uses Skyward to manage student information and communicate with parents.

“[Teaching] is a public business, and we’re serving children, and the parents have a right to be a partner in their child’s education, and [technology] has really helped. "

Chris explains that Skyward allows teachers to put in grades real time. Parents can login and see students’ grades, discipline, and attendance. He finds that this instructional technology adds a degree of transparency and opens up communication among stakeholders.

People can be resistant to system-wide change at first. For instance, some teachers may feel threatened when the outside comes in to see into teacher’s business. However, what goes on in the classroom is not just the teacher's business. Rather, it's everyone’s business, and parents have the right to see what’s going on in the classroom.

“One of the things about instructional technology that I think is really helpful is that it adds a degree of transparency…between the community and the vested parties and the school. Part of the difficulty in school administration is getting open communication between parents and stakeholders and the teachers.”


Chris's Take on Technology Inside his Special Ed Classroom
Chris teaches one freshman resource math class of 10 students. In the class, they go over about half of the algebra curriculum.

In terms of technology, it's not necessarily of benefit to integrate technology. Sometimes, the students in this class need a more "basic approach." His students tend to benefit more from concrete, physical activities.

He uses online resources for projects and online materials that go with the textbook adoption. He uses PowerPoint presentations for note-taking. He projects fill-in-the-blank-style notes onto the whiteboard and use a marker to fill in the gaps.

Chris has experimented with other technology-integrations projects. For example, he made a cheap interactive whiteboard using a Wiimote (remote control for the Nintendo Wii gaming system) and software developed by Johnny Chung Lee.






Helping Other Teachers Integrate Technology
With English-language Learners, the district uses Rosetta Stone to help students with learning English. Because of the small size of the ELL sub-population, the district is unable to dedicate a full-time staff member to their instruction. While a program such as Rosetta Stone might help students make gains in language, Chris explains that it doesn’t help students develop the cognitive academic language proficiencies (CALP) that the students need.

At the school district's alternative high school campus, they use computer-assisted instruction to teach students at varying academic levels.

For poor readers, they have incorporated screen reading technology. Chris likes the voices provided through the ATT screen-reading technologies more than some other options, saying they often sound more natural than other options.

For some students with autism spectrum disorders, he has found that providing a combination of instructional settings has helped these students be more successful. The traditional classroom can cause a great deal of “sensory overload.”

He cites the example of one such student who uses computer-guided instruction successfully for chemistry and US history. The student is able to focus on these subjects without having classmates disturb him.

But for geometry, this student has not benefited from computer-guided instruction. His frustration level rises quickly when working on this subject, so he tends to benefit from a more traditional instructional model. Using varied settings for this student, Chris has noticed a rise in this student’s self-esteem.


Technology Proficiency of Teachers at School
Chris starts by explaining innovations he’s witnessed over the course of his tenure during the past ten years. Approximately nine years ago, the district transitioned from paper-based gradebooks to electronic gradebooks. There were teachers at that time who had issues with the transition and had to receive one-on-one assistance to understand.

He likes to use the math teachers as his "litmus test" for new innovations. Several teachers in this department have been teaching for several decades. Most math teachers have LCD projectors in their classes, and some use Bluetooth-enabled input tablet from eInstruction.

Chris cites the example of one teacher who posts all lessons online. She uses TI SmartView to emulate the graphing calculator. Everything is on the data projector. She uses pictures to demonstrate the stages of math problems. Document cameras being expensive, she does this with a nice web cam mounted on a broken overhead projector: it works well.


The Student Response to Technology
Chris suspects that this rural population is less tech-inclined than, say, a more urban or suburban population of kids might be. The kids tend to be more kinesthetically inclined (e.g., they’d rather ride a tractor than type on a computer). This said, he would still describe them as “wired in.” For instance, many of the students use social networking tools such as MySpace and Facebook.

On the one hand, he finds that they seem more internet-savvy now than they were just a few years ago. He sees students evaluating information more critically and being less naïve when faced with online information. And, on the other hand, he thinks it’s possible that he’s seeing a decrease in kids’ ability to delay gratification.

“One of the things with the information technology is that we have information delivered so quickly and expediently, so sometimes waiting or struggling for the answer can be difficult, and that’s actually something that we almost have to continue to teach the students.”


Administrator Expectations
In Texas, the implementation of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is not in complete accord with the state standardized testing. When NCLB looks at the results of the Texas standardized tests (known as the TAKS), they use those results to judge the school’s performance. Additionally, the same standardized test results are used to decide whether students can pass and graduate.

This double-dipping of purpose has called what Chris describes as “interesting conflicts.” For one thing, the validity and reliability of the measures of these tests are questioned by some critics, although Chris explains that this is improving. There are questions surrounding the appropriateness of applying the results of the standardized tests to special populations.

The results of the TAKS test can translate to the giving or withholding of funding in a number of ways.

Sanger ISD does not place what Chris describes as an overbearing pressure on individual teachers to perform, and he finds this to be positive in that it allows teachers to use their training to meet the needs of their students in the classroom. While this has its benefits, it also includes the risk that students will advance through the grades without the achievement of a cohesive and cumulative goal set.

In response to this risk, the district has adopted the online curriculum which provides the vertical curricular alignment that hopes to prevent gaps in student learning.

Chris describes a “pretty conservative” district philosophy where educational technology is concerned. Rather than forcing the integration of technology on teachers, the district encourages the use of technology. The district emphasizes teaching and learning as a process that occurs among people in social contexts. This social approach is a strength of SISD.

"We’re talking about PowerPoints and document cameras. We’re talking about internet access. We’re talking about computer labs and a few computers in the classrooms. We’re talking availability. But not so much the one-on-one access that the Texas Education Agency would like to see.”



Obstacles to Technology Integration
As a technology integrator, Chris says that it has not been so much what he knows about as it has been what others (e.g., teachers, administrators, etc.) want to do that has been important. He gives the example of how he tried to get the district to install a Moodle server 5 years ago but the administration did not support it.

He has come to learn that he cannot expect teachers to instantly embrace new technologies that he introduces them to. Rather, teachers need to be given time to explore the technologies and discover the relevance of those technologies to their instruction.

His role has shifted from one of recommending specific technological interventions to one of listening to what teachers are saying they think they need and supporting those needs. He attributes this shift from recommender to facilitator to helping him become more useful to his colleagues.


The Change Chris Dreams Of
Chris dreams of implementing a learning object repository for displaying teacher and student artifacts that also has a strong social networking piece.

“We recreate the wheel in education so much that I think we could increase efficiency and effectiveness if we had access to each other’s content on a larger scale.”