Sunday, September 13, 2015

Technology and the Future of Everything

Last week I facilitated some teacher professional development, and I was thinking of how far we have come with technology, and of course, how quickly we need to catch up to what's "new" and wonderful to improve learning outcomes for our students. Many schools are all Google classrooms, they collaborate digitally, e-mail their teachers and peers, and process or write their papers and turn them in on the "cloud". There are definitely a lot of pros to this kind of classroom, but it also has me contemplating what will be obsolete in 10 years. In ten years, will there be  need for paper and pencil? How quickly will textbook adoptions include tablets and e-books versus the paper kind? If you are incredulous over the thought of that, I encourage you to do some research on your local schools. Ask them what kind of technology they use. I'll venture to guess you would be surprised at how many tech tools they have! If you think low income students do not have access to technology, you would be mistaken. They have access at school, which means that teaching practices must be altered to take this fact in to consideration. Take this quote about homework by researcher Alfie Kohn in to consideration:
"There is no evidence of any academic benefit from homework in elementary school.  Even if you were untroubled by the methodological concerns I’ve been describing, the fact is that after decades of research on the topic, there is no overall positive correlation between homework and achievement (by any measure) for students before middle school – or, in many cases, before high school.  More precisely, there’s virtually no research at all on the impact of homework in the primary grades – and therefore no data to support its use with young children – whereas research has been done with students in the upper elementary grades and it generally fails to find any benefit." 
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So how do we begin to change our instructional practice to make it more up-to-date? The truth is that children today are much different than children ten years ago. That's right, 10 years ago. Technology, like it or not, shapes the way we think, interact, and the way our brains work. It is both advantageous and detrimental. We, as digital natives, must give students the capacity to use the tools at their fingertips responsibly and safely. Technology makes lessons more engaging, interactive, and can improve our efficiency. Its advantages far outweigh the negatives.

"There is also little doubt that all of the new technologies, led by the Internet, are shaping the way we think in ways obvious and subtle, deliberate and unintentional, and advantageous and detrimental. The uncertain reality is that, with this new technological frontier in its infancy and developments emerging at a rapid pace, we have neither the benefit of historical hindsight nor the time to ponder or examine the value and cost of these advancements in terms of how it influences our children’s ability to think."
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What sticks with me is the line "we have neither the benefit of historical hindsight nor the time to ponder or examine the value and cost of these advancements in terms of how it influences our children’s ability to think." We don't have time to think about how technology is changing student's brains because it is moving too fast!

To teach the future we need to change. It's as simple and as complicated as that.

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