My idea of education technology has changed,
but not so much from the standpoint of how it will work in the classroom, but
how educators will use it.
The professionals that were in class with me
came from wildly different backgrounds and ability levels. To be perfectly blunt, a few people I felt
knew a little more than I did, but a lot of people that knew less than most of
the students that I deal with. It will
take hours of work on their end to understand the use of technology. This class is definitely a step in the right
direction.
Sitting in class tonight and watching all of
the projects, we saw a number of patterns that popped up. Blabberize, though neat and engaging, is just
another way to deliver a lecture or a speech, was in a bulk of the
projects. Many of the projects had
students create presentations using Prezi – replacing PowerPoints of old. In others, we say projects that included a
plethora of links and embedded videos that students can engage in that isn’t as
dull like reading.
I think that’s the bottom line. Every innovation in education – from even the
actual lecture itself – we have pushed students further and further away from
reading. I chatted with a colleague last
week about the very topic of reading.
He’s an AP teacher, very old school, and spends his summers reading AP
exams and is in constant search for the best World Civilization textbook (how
boring!) What he’s found is that the
text books that he’s looked at over the years have been “pictured up” with all
kinds of charts, graphs, and photos that as he puts it, “really adds nothing to
the story. Students don’t even get a chance to wonder about what things look
like. If there isn’t a photo, there’s a
picture.” This has negatively impacted
the reading level. In turn, the writing
quality has diminished over the years, too.
I think we spend a lot of time marveling at
the what’s available on the internet and would love for our students to find
their own answers on it. A lot of times,
the students obtain answers that are adequate for the application. The problem is that when students easily
answer questions or solve problems because the class is behind and we “have to
get <this> in” we aren’t really helping them learn the material. In the high school setting, the students are
generally getting their information from a website that was written for the
general population (around 8th grade level) and probably throw those
into a prezi and present it to the class.
Since the prezi had 5 slides, there were a couple pictures in it, and it
had less than 4 words per slide, the kid probably gets a B, probably an A. “They tried and worked together,” is a
response I’ve gotten from a teacher before.
Let’s look at the whole thing – Kid gets an A, teacher “integrates
technology,” and the rest of the students learn nothing, but at least they
TALKED about the topic they had to!
Content is king and I just don’t think we
remember that anymore. I feel with
technology, it’s turned into how the package looks.
