TEACHERS NEED TO GET AWAY FROM TEACHING FACTS. Those days are nearly over. It used to be that we had a veritable monopoly on facts. We had the knowledge, the experience, and the textbooks that qualified us as distributors of facts. We also took our books back each year.

If someone wanted to know the causes leading up to World War I, they had to take a history class or flip through the volumes of periodical index guides at their local library.

No more. The world of facts is literally at everyone’s fingertips. They are often just a Google search away. We’ve lost the stranglehold on facts. They’ve slipped out of the bag and are now free for all and available to anyone with an Internet connection … if.

If students know where to find the facts, they can learn and use them. That is what we must be teaching now — how to mine the Internet. How do we locate, sort, evaluate, compile, collaborate, and share the facts? That’s our new subject area. That is our new task.

Many of us have seen it coming for years, but few have changed their methods. Some still lecture all the facts around historical events, scientific discoveries, artistic and mechanical techniques. It’s one of the reasons kids are zoning out in class. Most are aware that teachers are using valuable class time to convey factual content that they can look up themselves in far less time.

What students need, whether they know it or not, besides mining methods, is help in manipulating the facts. How do they put the facts together? What do the facts mean when clustered? How do they extract relevance from the facts?

This message was made clear to our entire BUSD faculty last Tuesday when we had a teacher in-service day without students. We had a guest speaker who talked to an auditorium of teachers about the meaning of Common Core and what is expected to get it fully adopted.

To my great relief, she began by saying that teachers need to get away from pitching facts. What a breath of fresh air to hear a claim I’ve been making mouthed by another in authority. I’ve actually been mouthing it for years, but she had teeth.

Common Core standards have levels of technology woven in from elementary to graduation. What before were technology enrichment suggestions, options, and backup plans are now expected skill sets. We are aboard a ramp to the cloud.

With the help of Touro University, which offers an excellent and inexpensive credentialing program, our ascension should be seamless. Touro has helped BUSD graduate 24 Benicia teachers with masters degrees in educational technology. We have potential mentors everywhere.

It’s ironic, I suppose, that I’m seeing this through a revolving door as I’m headed out. I believe I have made the adoption process a bit easier by training so many teachers on tech-integration skills. They will be able to pick up this Common Core mandate and run with it. That pleases me.

The other activity for teachers on in-service day was to get trained on using Google Apps. This year we are officially becoming a Google App School. We are bringing Google in to umbrella many of our online needs. We will use Google Calendar for meetings and events. We will use Google Drive to share important documents with staff. We will soon have Google email for all teachers and students. Soon our campus assignments, lessons, and contacts will be floating on the same cloud.

Teachers can trial the brand new Google Classroom, a suite of services similar to Edmodo or Blackboard, if you know what those are. They are called VLEs, Virtual Learning Environments. They offer a single-site solution to many classroom management needs. Blackboard costs thousands. Edmodo and Google Classroom are free. We like free.

I am happy to be working with freshmen. I stopped teaching facts quite a while ago. I work from a website that points the way. We connect to resources students can keep, not turn in at the end of the semester.

Currently we are learning online collaboration in response to our first novel. Last week all students established a Google Drive and partnered up to write a study guide for “Anthem” by Ayn Rand using a shared Google Document.

I was looking for insights and a bit of tech integration. I let students who could, use their phones. Everyone had to partner, then meet on the shared document. This was more fun than everyone writing their own study guide, and it turned everyone into a teacher.

To watch BUSD teachers adopting technology pleases me. I’m happy to see it.

It feels like when you throw a party that starts, say, at 2 p.m. and then at 2:05 with your silly hat on, no one has shown up yet and you begin to wonder who will come and who won’t, and why not?

Then at three o’clock when no one has arrived, you lapse into gallows humor. “Well, this chili will be good for the compost pile.” However, by four o’clock a dozen people have filed in, and they keep on coming, ding-dong! ding-dong! until by five o’clock your house is packed, the joint is jumping, and everyone’s having a ball. That’s how it feels.

Steve Gibbs teaches at Benicia High School and has written a column for The Herald since 1985.