What would NECC have been like without the Internet? I am not being facetious – I remember when I first started teaching. It was 1986, the Mac SE20 was a big deal (that’s 20 MB, thank you!), and I was very excited to have an Intel486 with a COLOR MONITOR with its own dot matrix printer in my physics classroom. Teachers was isolated to what we could do in our classroom or sometimes by combining classes with the teacher across the hall. Computers were interesting, but more as a nice way to enter and graph your data – if you didn’t know how to write programs, then they didn’t do much more. Flash forward – now because of the ubiquity of the Internet, we can communicate and collaborate across the building, district, state, country and around the world. Publishing and sharing of information is the name of the game – so our emphasis as teachers needs to shift from teaching content to teaching how to sift through and evaluate the overwhelming amount of information we get thrown at us every day. I’m not sure how important it is that biology students learn exactly what Golgi bodies are, but they need to be able to read the website on the latest and greatest diet to come down the line, and know how to locate and evaluate the accuracy of that website. I don’t how much longer we can continue expanding the breadth of what students are expected to know and do on high stakes testing before we reach a tipping point – right now high school graduates are expected to know almost everything about almost everything, and yet we aren’t really giving them the tools to evaluate the new information that will be thrown at them after they leave high school. I remember being in a staff development 20 years ago when the presenter said his job as a teacher was to help students turn on their ‘crap detectors’ – and I think those words ring truer now than they were then.
