I have been wrestling all week with trying to design a staff development that would teach teachers how to integrate technology into their teaching, and having a hard time. After all, it took me 36 hours of graduate study to just begin to wrap my brain around all the ways the evolution of computers, technology, and networking has changed the way we communicate and learn, so how am I supposed to get this all across to teachers in a matter of a few hours. Plus add to that the generally uneasy feeling I have that I”m kind of wasting my breath anyway, because until we move away from these stupid TAKS tests that value content knowledge over knowing how to use it, we will continue to cram as much content into students as we can at the expense of allowing time to synthesize, create, and THINK.
It finally hit me – we’re still going about this all wrong. We keep teaching the teachers HOW to use their technology as if that was all that was required. For example, we hold training after training on how to use various applications and pieces of equipment. Here’s how to use publisher, here’s how to use Powerpoint, etc. – but somehow if you observe how technology is being used in the classroom, the sad fact is that most of the time we are using compters and the internet like a bigger, faster, flashier instructional television and film of the 50s and 60s. We stream in United Streaming videos and BrainPop to introduce a lesson and engage students, but then as soon as the video is over, we go right back to having them read text, answer fill in the blanks questions on a worksheet, and then hand them in for a grade – so the main use of the technology is for content delivery. Seems to me the whole point of the Internet is that it allows communication across vast distances rapidly, so instead of filling in the blanks about India, why don’t we contact students who live in India and find out what are their daily lives like? The power of computers is that they can perform repetitive calculations quickly and accurately, so instead of studying how to manually calculate percentages, why don’t we use a spreadsheet to model what difference it makes if you are paying a credit card off using the minimum monthly payment at 21% interest? Yes, that’s a messy calculation, but that is what computers are good at doing – and then we can spend more time discussing the really important stuff like how many hours per week you’d have to work at minimum wage to afford to live in a three bedroom apartment and make car payments. The reason we aren’t preparing students for life in the technology age is that we are using our technology to teach them in the same manner that our parents and grandparents were taught, even though our kids are facing a whole different set of circumstances and challenges.
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