It has been a while I'm thinking how educators bring kids to higher technology competency level, or is it that students bring their instructors to their level.
Last week, for the first time in my life, I heard a podcast and learned about its implication on education. I learned how to record on Audacity and how to work all the way to create a podcast. We also listened to sample podcasts from 3rd graders and their collaborative work on producing one, five years ago. With technology, things go fast. What you learn today on computer and its implementation might only work for a few years unless you update yourself every single day.
When I see kids of different ages playing with their iphones, ipods, video games, nintendos, wiis, smart phones, ipads, computers and more so easily and even sometimes without reading the texts of How tos, I'm surprised how fast everything is going and How I can keep up with this speed. More importantly How I can keep my students in class entertained as well as educated. I would just imagin myself, lecturing kids from textbooks while they are reading from their kindles and asking them to write down multiplication tables on paper, while they are doing it on their smart phones. Moreover, they are a multitasking generation, and thus they might be doing ten other things at the same time, listening to their podcasts can be just one of them.
It just worries me that by the time, I get the hold of these strategies in my classrooms, there would defintely be ten more updated technology tools, that I don't know of and I am sure, my students have already mastered them!
Who is really teaching who? Podcasting is just one example of tech tools that I didn't know of and I learned it last week. What about all the other tools?
Your statement, “Who is really teaching who?” gave me the opportunity to recollect on a past lecture. Last month I taught my students the names and characteristics of the 4 major types of clouds. This week three of my students brought in photographs of clouds that they took and printed from digital camera and we posted them on the board. When students line up to leave our classroom they point to and name the clouds that are in the pictures.
ReplyDeleteMy students used technology to produce a teaching tool that reinforces our curriculum. They are teaching me to create more teaching moments with photos. This week we are using photos to define nouns, verbs, and adjectives. (Example: All of the posters have 8 photos that include students and items. One of the noun photos is of three students holding a book. Book is a noun.) I am teaching my students as my students teach me.