Retrospection

This is my major feeling about tech in ed. I think it's great. It has huge potential to give student writing and reading a more relavent connection to reality, to a real audience, and to the culture that they already perscribe to. The problem is, sometimes I feel like it can become a severely time consuming, expensive, misleading tangent. (To tech in ed's credit, just about anything can become a time consuming, expensive, misleading tangent.) Here's what technology won't do for education: It won't do the work for us. It's not a magic fix. It won't make kids smarter in and of itself. It won't make learning easier or faster.

In one last tribute to David Warlick, a compliment he received from a conference attendee really struck a chord with me:

he kept saying how right my address was, that it wasn’t about the stuff, it wasn’t about the technology, that it was about the information, that the kids figure out the technology for themselves. They need us to teach them how to work the information.

I don't entirely understand what this individual was talking about, because I did not hear the talk myself, but I certainly think he's on to something.

I think good use of technology need to enhance teacher goals that should exist without technology. Technology should be a tool to do what we already would have done without it. In the English classroom, technology can serve as a great tool for student creativity and composition. They have easy access to endless information, images, music and video. They have a real potential audience for work that they publish. It opens up a whole new world of possibilities for student voices to be heard and for students to feel that their opinion and their critical thought matters.

As a high school teacher, I'm excited to use some of the technology tools that I have learned about while writing this blog. The problem that I know I will face however, is consideration for the first world's time contraints and social demands. This blog assignment, for instance was very benefical. I learned a lot from it. I feel that I have developed in many ways as a writer through it. I do think that asking high school students to find media articles relavent to a pre-chosen topic would be very cumbersome, time consuming, frusterating, and posibly madenning to even their parents. Perhaps the best way to look at something like this is "all things in moderation." It will also help imensly if the students are given a large amount of freedom to write about whatever it is they would like to write about. In this way they can pick something that is more relevant to current media (the war in Iraq) as opposed to something academic which the media is not entirely interested in (how should we teach lit to adolecents?)

Personal Validation
November 17, 2006 at 10:58 am
by David Warlick
Complete Article