I read, on a daily basis, quite a few blogs, and news sites focused solely on education, I look a t blogs from a number of countries, and even a member of a couple online communities of teachers. There is a problem I see in many of these blogs which has been a growing source of disillusionment for me… the vast majority of these sites (i.e. suites which profess to deal with the future of education) only focus upon a couple topics:
(1) Gee whiz factor gadgets and multi-media as a be all and end all
(2) The notion of multi-student, multi-teacher, multi-school, and multi-country collaboration as a be all and end all.
As part of a much larger view of what needs to take place, as a means to offer some specific alternatives to the huge numbers of failing students, failing teaches, and failing schools…these are fine ideas. But I see so many so many edu-blogs where the author just ‘got religion’ and proselytize the idea that if we only gave students iPads, or eReaders, or if we collaborated with other classrooms in other schools…
I am getting tired of this.
Yeah it is a valid idea to experiment with, but how does this help with steadily decreasing funding, how does this help unmotivated students, coming from less than engaged homes… and more specifically, how does this jibe up with college requirements which, even though they have steadily lowered many entry standards for academics, still have a few left which are based upon individual student skills (reading, writing, comprehension in general, and the ability to work…).
It seems that many of the best and brightest new teachers are far too focused upon technology as a magic pill to save all of us… There are so many things which need to be addressed in our education system, it looks to me like the way we are addressing these problems is much like the story of the nine blind men and the elephant…
I imagine that this post could (with enough readers) generate some reflexive responses… Maybe I should state my point as clearly as possible then… I would respectfully suggest that more teachers look at the problems in education (and there are many of them) from a larger systems perspective and that more administrators and ‘education professionals’ look at more than ‘sweeping initiatives’ (which are usually nothing more than band-aids to maintain the status quo…).
You’ve brought up a lot of good points, and I will try to respond (in some manner) to all of them (in order).
The notion that there are more people talking about these issues is valid, and sadly enough quite justified… I see lots of perspectives in the main stream media (mostly short term and sensationalistic) and plenty of perspectives about some of the problems we face with the American education system from a number of education sites out there…. Maybe between the perspectives we seem to be drawing here is some solid ground… From what you are saying, I would deem it that there isn’t a lack of attention, and from what I try to imply, much of the talk is merely the first step, that if making enough noise to get more people involved…from a nationwide perspective.
As far as people trying to fix things, to come up with new answers to solve some of these problems, I think that for some of these valiant people, it has been an excruciating journey to make some simple progress, for others (thankfully), they haven’t been held back as much… I personally think that almost any idea worthy of discussion is worth trying out…
Whether these ideas ‘fit together’ (i.e. that they are scalable, transferable, etc.) is a problem I hope to have to deal with…if only because it will mean that we have some remedies out there…
The technology question is sometimes a bit problematic for me (I worked in the high tech industry for about 20 years) and I see most of the implementation of ‘high technology’ in school as tentative (taken as a whole). But, once again, there are many teachers out there who are making a real difference with the tools they have.
There are some who proselytize the ‘magic pill’ aspects of laptops, iPads, NetBooks, etc. These are merely tools which can be quite powerful if used in a valid manner. I have seen a lot of less than stellar uses of these sorts of tech in the past decade, but the good news is that there is much more pressure out there for some sort of tangible results (whatever tangible results are…). This falls in with my previous point that anything worth discussing is worth trying…
As far as software goes, the good news is that computer use, or perhaps a more accurate term would be online access, is still growing and changing. This is good news if only because there is such a dearth of good software (and it is never free…) specifically aimed at classroom use.
So, in this area, I would agree with you, in that the platform (whether Mac, PC, Linux, iPad, Motorola Xoom, Kindle, or what have you…) is not nearly as important as what you do with it.
There are some reasonably valid uses I have seen for grades 9-12 out there in the area of online tools, lessons, and content delivery. Besides using something like Moodle, there are plenty of cases where using some established online tools (such as Google Docs, Zoho suite, YouTube, and a host of other sites) can be used to create a much more varied and interesting environment for students.
As a final note, from what you have been writing I suspect that you are in the industry, and if this is true, I wish you the best of luck…in that merely being a teacher these days is far more difficult than I used to be…
P.S. I hope that the title to this post hasn’t turned you off from this blog…I need all the ‘thinking readers’ I can get!
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
Like