For my Digital Divide class at the Harvard School of Education, I decided to interview Rob Greco whom I'd initally met through his flickr and del.icio.us sites. Rob actually unschools his kids. When saw that I'd listed "homeschooling" as one of my interests on my flickr profile, he contacted me and I told him more about my research and the class I'm taking at Harvard.

It turns out that Rob is also a technology teacher at a small private school in Pasadena, CA. I thought he'd be an interesting person to talk to on many fronts.

Clip #1, Rob introduces himself and his role at the school.

Rob started using technology in the classroom when he was teaching Spanish. He liked to have the kids use audio and video as more fun and immersive ways of learning a language. At that time, he also got interested in making movies with the kids. They'd do shorts in Spanish. Rob described the process of having the kids plan and write a script first in Spanish. Then came the speaking and performace. Shooting video and editing were in a sense technical skills that came packaged with the Spanish lesson.

Clip #2, Rob moved to teaching a 5th grade homeroom.

Rob knew that the "traditional" required work needed to get done. So he structured his class so that the mornings were dedicated to getting the work done. Then, in the afternoons, he and the kids would work on special projects, such as claymation, videos and architecture projects. Rob also ran a summer school class in which the kids made media. Much of the kids' work can be found on the website.

Clip #3, Rob describes the computer facilities at his school.

It's clear that this school has made a desicion to make technology one of its priorities. Rob's training of teachers as well as students creates an integrated environment in which all are included in the learning process and presumably, all are invested in using computers to the full potential in the school.

The school where Rob works is not only very supportive of his youth media work, but it's also very well-equipped. It's a good example of a school that has a high ratio of computers to kids. Further, the kids start using computers early on. Rob mentions that their early work is to get familiar enough with the basic structural and navigational systems of a computer. After that, Rob says, the kids can pick up a particular application relatively easily. It would be a mistake, he noted, to teach a program such as Kid Pix, which dumbs down the application to the point where it's saving files for kids. In effect, kids wouldn't be learning those basic ways in which we use computers--how to save files, menus, finder interfaces, etc.

Because Rob's kids have this sort of training, it's possible that they then pick up iMovie or Photoshop more easily. First they get the basic concepts and further, they then have the motivation to follow through and get results. The "immursion" in technology helps as well. Kids become familiar with the language of computers at an earlier age which makes transitions to new applications much smoother. Rob also mentioned that his school requires kids take a class in media literacy in which they learn how to deconstruct imagery and apply those critical thinking skills to the media they make in turn.

Clip #4, Rob looks to the future of media & technology in the school setting.

Rob rightly sees these project-based curricula questions as being ones that involve a conversation with the entire school community, not just the parents who are willing to buy their kids laptops, and not just the administrators who want to make a policy change. The school will have to rethink how to take advantage of technology in terms of the transmedia literacies that kids could be developing. Parents will have to reassess what they think is valuable for their kids to be learning in school: memorizing facts and figures or perhaps spending more time exploring expressions of creative thinking. Teachers will have to first be comfortable enough with technology and a more collaborative learning environment. Rob's insight about the necessary change in curricula approach is an interesting one. It begs the question of will Youth Media will end up playing a more mainstream role in the classroom, rather than being something fun and extra--enrichment, essentially. WIth a change in curricula, comes a change in assessment. Certainly, the No Child Left Behind public school policies do not present the fitting direction.

In a way, Rob's experiments with curricula and indeed with his own job description, are tantamount to a peek into the future of the classroom.

"My point is that you can't just tell the kids, yeah we'll make a movie perhaps. You have to have a goal and parameters. You have a problem and parameters, but you don't know exactly what the outcome will be, what the end product will look like. Too much of school is about having the outcome already set in mind, and then forcing the kids to replicate that outcome as perfectly as possible. A lot of the social software stuff we use on the web at home, I'd like to integrate that into the school. Google maps, flickr...."

Assessment? Well, you're right it's hard because you can tell the kids are doing well and they're learning, but they're learning how to learn and that's not as easy to prove. I do think if we move to a project based curriculum we'll have to have some bench marks. But with the movies that I've made with the kids, they had to write a script which I then assesssed in the reportcards and what not. There's also a lot of working with others which you can mark on the reportcards. But you have to make sure there's individual work and group work as well. Because in any group you'll have a couple kids who will just do the whole thing and then you have kids who will fade behind and let others do the work. In the part of the process where the kids had to figure out how to use the school as a set, that's problem solving! In other words, we knew we could have a scene in an office, but we didn't have anything that would make a convincing beach scene."