Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I certainly agree with you that,
“There is significant, rich, deep teaching and learning happening in classrooms without technology, and there is lousy teaching happening where the kids spend more time in front of screens.”
And, that is an argument I’ve heard many times before. Yet, I think there is also a lot of weak, shallow teaching happening as well, regardless of tech infusion or lack there of.

That said, what I try to present to teachers is the idea that technology can offer opportunities that a typical classroom cannot. I still see Middle School students colouring maps and doing cookie-cutter style Country Studies, when students can be digitally ‘visiting’ countries, creating and labeling personal Google Maps and connecting to students (or Teachers or Historians) in the country they are studying.

Yes there is, “lousy teaching happening where the kids spend more time in front of screens” but there are lousy lectures happening in our digital-less classrooms too… should we just not lecture from now on? I feel like this is a ‘throw the baby out with the bath water’ kind of argument and as you can see it gets me a bit riled up.

Technology infusion into the classroom has its’ own pedagogical challenges. It does NOT make a teacher’s life easier! Technology infusion changes the way we need to teach and that poses more challenges as we figure out what is effective, engaging and meaningful to students and their learning.

Perhaps our delivery of the message needs to change, but regardless of our approach we are trying to break a very old mold… it is extremely difficult to implement disruptive change gently.

We cannot ‘…go quietly into our classrooms’! We must embrace the Brave New World-Wide-Web.

Great food for thought. Here’s a video to add to the buffet: (I saw it yesterday on David Warlick’s site)

As positive as the message of the video is about change and potential, I wonder about the technological xenophobia I see directed at some teachers by tech leaders. I have heard the natives/immigrants dichotomy (and it is a dichotomy to them)tossed about often. There is significant, rich, deep teaching and learning happening in classrooms without technology, and there is lousy teaching happening where the kids spend more time in front of screens.

I think if we want our colleagues to see the potential in a technology, we have to frame the invitation differently than we do for our students, beyond “if you demo it, they will come”. It is a bit like the pap served up in “A Vision of K-12 Students Today”
…it continues to frame tech use/non use as a competency/incompetency proposition.

I really liked how Dan Meyer responded to it here.

By the way, I admire the way you are reflecting on your posts. Socrates (via Plato) would be so proud!

Cheers, Jan