Maybe a better way of looking at this would be to consider whether technology is driving these changes, or whether education is driving the technology…Obviously this is a rhetorical point…technology wins…
I have seen some very tentative uses of technology by teachers in the field, have looked over innumerable blogs and edu-sites which proselytize the advantages of using tech in classrooms, and wonder a lot about just who is driving this (at all?). I’ve sat in lots of classrooms where whatever au courante technology sits gathering dust, whether it be a smart board, multiple computers in the classroom, big screen TV’s, or what have you… I sometimes think that the implementation of iPads in middle and high schools is far too close to handing out bribes and toys just to keep them ‘interested’.
Getting back to my point, there seems to be a rather wide gulf between the teachers who are working at the cutting edge of new ways of teaching…and the other 95%.
I think that these teaches are doing a great job, and may be trail blazing for some of us…but I worry…not about the implicit digital divide this is going to make in education. While many would love to be dealing with a lot technology in the classroom…I think that more and more students innately live in this world…regardless of what schools do…BUT…
You don’t need a crystal ball to see that in a general sense, most education budgets (across the country) are not going to be going up… and many of these progressive uses of technology seem to work well in small groups…I don’t see class sizes getting smaller any time soon…
There are some tangential problems too; maybe the elephant in the room could be the fact that there are so many teachers out there who are technophobic… I can’t say whether this is a generational issue, or one merely of different personality types, but I have personally dealt with more teachers who are extremely critical of using ‘new fangled’ gadgets in classrooms than those who are for it…
Finally there is the chicken /egg dichotomy in that many students deal with the fundamentals of online life innately…who is teaching whom? I wonder if there is any correlation between this point and the notion that we should just let students ‘learn’ whatever tickles their fancy…
As you may see form the disjointed character of this post, I am only just starting to see some of the questions…there may be some answers out there…
Keeping Up with the Digital Native
http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/02/keeping-up-with-the-digital-native
Effects of Technology on Classrooms and Students
http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/EdReformStudies/EdTech/effectsstudents.html
Using the technology of today in the classroom of today
http://education.mit.edu/papers/GamesSimsSocNets_EdArcade.pdf
May I offer some advice to assist you as you knit together the "disjointed character" of your post? You might get some mileage out of trying to better articulate the specific problem you're wrestling with. This would help readers too. For example, you're first paragraph describes the subject simply as "this" and "these changes" and so on, with out specifying exactly which "this" and what "those" you're referring to. Same for the second paragraph, and so on. A better focus on the subject might shed valuable light on the subject.
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