Since I intend to cover some technology tools for teachers (especially social studies teachers),I want to preface all of these reviews with some thoughts about how we, as teachers address technology. There are several points of view I have seen in the last couple of years (since I became a teacher), the first, and most common one is that of being a passive technophobe. This all too common of an attitude for teachers is quite obviously predicated upon the fact that most teachers, even new teachers who could have had some instruction in technology…didn’t, and the rest of them seemingly feel quite put upon with regard to having to learn so many new tricks. The second, much smaller group is comprised of technophiles, people who innately love change, and have taken the internet, and computers to heart. This isn’t to say that they all embrace all of the technology implicit in computers/internet, but they are willing to learn.
The last group is one I find the most interesting, the principled technophobes. This very small group of people seems to have nothing against technology; it’s just that they don’t see it as any sort of a panacea for the ills in education. I can understand that, since if you look over some of the education / internet sites and blogs out there it almost feels like you are in the presence of the newly converted (in a religious sense). A lot of this hysteria is over the top.
Technology, and the new technologies which teachers are adapting to, or are being confronted by, is here to stay. I do think that these new tools should be seen as what they are…that is, tools. These tools are not the second coming, will not make bored and inattentive students into gleaming examples of how the world can be fixed with just money.
When I was in college to become a social studies teacher, one of my favorite teachers was Professor Mike Garret (formerly of Bemidji State University in Minnesota). He was an old social studies teacher, and his point of view was that while new technology was a great adjunct to teaching, if you couldn’t teach a class with one piece of chalk while standing on a tar parking lot, you couldn’t really teach. This could be best summed up as really ‘old school’. There are some worthwhile implications in this point of view; in essence you should embrace the new, and keep the old. Just because you can teach a class which has projects based upon creating YouTube videos doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep up the skills to…draw a world map on a blackboard in less than one minute.
Another important point to make about the use of technology in the classroom is that is shouldn’t really be the focus of anything other than topics in teacher preparations. There are far more important things for teachers to deal with, and I am not talking about classroom management techniques or the politics of No Child Left Behind either. Especially for high school, the notion that students should be learning how to think is one that has sadly fallen from view, with the sole exception being that the topic heading is occasionally brought up to bolster some other points about educational quality. I have talked about Bloom’s Taxonomy, about the meaninglessness of having students shut up in class and work alone of ‘worksheets’. I found an interesting article about the same problem in our colleges that relates to my point of view:
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_edu/problem.html
But you know what they come home showing me? Worksheets where they got everything right. That’s what they think they’re SUPPOSED to be proud of. That they can sit, and concentrate, and finish what they’re doing (they don’t get to go out to recess unless they do), and get everything right. Well, dammit, THAT’s not thinking. That’s learning to be efficient and get the answers you’re supposed to get. Thinking is something else entirely. It’s being curious, and being wrong most of the time, and maybe, just maybe coming up with something you’ve made that you’re proud of and pleased with, something all your own (even if it turns out later that someone else had thought of it too).
I suppose as a final point, I worked in several other industries before becoming a teacher, and that the broad canons of what professionalism represents is almost always based upon keeping up with the state of the art, and that this action falls upon you, not the place you work at. I suspect that teachers may be learning these sorts of lessons sooner or later…
