It’s easy to forget how quickly things change sometimes. Right now I’m writing a blog, everyone is. This wasn’t something that I would have needed to experience when I started undergrad. Yes, there were blogs back then, but they weren’t everywhere. Way back in the far-away days of 2002 there was just Live Journal and it was terrible. It wasn’t that long ago that my family would come to my brother or myself for help getting whatever wasn’t working to “just do what it’s supposed to do for the love of god.” But, now that I’m a dinosaur like them, I’ve been sacked and it’s up to my younger cousins to know everything about everything that’s coming out, and I am now obsolete.
Of course others are in the same boat. Obviously we can’t give up, it’s not like technology is going to go away and really we wouldn’t be too happy if it did. We just have to keep up, no matter how arduous a task that might be for some of us.
We’ve been told in class and in the videos provided and probably on 60 Minutes about the growing disconnect between teachers and their students and it’s easy to understand with the speed at which tech grows. But, thankfully, educators aren’t throwing in the towel. The NJCCCS states very clearly that it acknowledges the important role that technology plays and will continue to play in the growth of young people, and I do agree that that is a role that current and future educators should nurture, not run from. The natural next step for us should be to embrace that technology and integrate it into the way we do things.
We can’t teach kids how best to learn, how best to study maybe, but not how best to learn. Instead we have to find out how students are already learning and approach them through that new media. As we’ve seen, some are already doing this quite well, utilizing web sites, pod casts, open forums and more to help their kids get what they need. We’ll have to do all that and more because technology’s not going to stop growing. But, it will be worth it eventually, once my little cousins finally teach me how everything works.
You are correct - students learn differently, or at least are motivated to learn differently. Today, my teachers and I, in a teacher study group session after school, discussed how to engage students during a lesson. One stragety is "cold call" a student so that he/she is always paying attention and will engage in the lesson. I asked "why do we need to engage students? Why do we need to convince students that learning is important? Technology is now being used across the country to engage students and get them to interact with content in a manner that suits them.
ReplyDeleteMy son is writing a comic strip at this moment, in the style of Captain Underpants. He has the storyboard and characters, along with the dialogue. I offered up technology to help him with the formatting and design. He refused. He actually liked drawing the characters and putting it all together on his own. I was proud of him. Now, what motivated him?