I enjoyed the video A Vision of Students Today. I think it summarizes my districts approach to technology and web 2.0. I am one of the few teachers that uses many of the things they mention in the video. I blog, have a website, and issues homework on the web. Granted the area of the country is the poorest in the nation, computers are readily available for students.
I have been stuck in this backwards thinking of education for 5 years and it seems as if the school district would love to spend money on new teaching methods that require more books, and equipment rather than using what is available on the web.
In the past three weeks I have attempted to infuse technology in every aspect of my teaching. We have listened to Flocabulary on thursdays. This helps reinforce the topics we covered. We are going to be using Youtube.com to host our class projects (with consent from parents), and their homework is issued via twitter. I don't know the exact percentage of students that use it, but I can be sure they have all seen it at least three times in the past three weeks. That's more than I can say for my co-workers.
Digital Natives in the classroom ( http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/articles/digitalnatives/index.htm ) states that "Today's students and young workers are part of a cohort he calls "Digital Natives." Raised on MTV, video games, e-mail, the Web and instant messaging, Digital Natives have developed cognitive thinking patterns that differ from previous generations. As a result, the challenge facing educational designers is to recognize these cognitive differences and to develop learning offerings that are appropriate to their cognitive learning patterns."
While I don't fully accept this concept I do realize that students are evolving, and the education structure has to move with it. My school does a good job providing the instruments to make the music the kids will listen to, but the teachers fail to learn all the notes necessary to play that symphony. Instead, we have a few savants playing well, and others making the music sound unintelligible. The educational system needs to revamp and realize that the reason we are behind many countries is that we have met our students at the same learning levels they are at. Instead we try to speak 20th century, and the logic and reasoning comes out garbled.
I have also attempted to make my projects less about the overall product and more about the message. I started to look at Apple's Challenged Based Learning and how the implement it in the classroom.
Apple has done a great job in making students indentify a challenge and requires them to draw on prior learning, acquire new knowledge, and tap their creativity to fashion solutions. I believe I will try that with my World Geography class through out the semester and incorporate it into solving an environmental problem.
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