Jul 18 2008
Exploding heads!
Man, my head is going to explode I think. This summer has been full of ___________ . I’ve had some fantastic discussion on my PBS Teacherline training discussion board and am enjoying some great emails with John Hendron about this whole thing called educational technology, standards, and professional development. Perhaps for the first time I am really beginning to organize my thoughts in a way in which I can articulate them clearly, with passion and openness. It’s a little hard to explain, to be honest.
In addition to this I’ve read some compelling posts by edu-bloggers as well. Specifically this post from Will Richardson titled, “What I Hate about Twitter.” The comments here are excellent in terms of what this whole thing means to others. At the same time I’ve been aware, more or less, of what I call the ‘house of mirrors’ or ‘the echo chamber,’ that we edu-blogger techie folks tend to live in. As I’ve become more aware of this, I now want to work this next year to expand these ideas and these practices throughout my ‘overly small’ school division in southwest virginia. i’m compiling some simple goals to work towards next year that i think will help.
The area that I’ve been chewing hard on is that area that has to do with the whole emphasis on standardized testing. It seems often that the focus of using educational techology is on how we improve test scores. Not that this is a horrible thing, but it seems to me that it is perhaps a little misguided. At the same time, the internal dialogue pushes back when I remind myself that the teachers with whom I work are judged based on how their particular group of students score on the test at the end of the year. Keep those test scores up and you’re good. If they’re low then things can get dicey.
My focus is less on the test score but more on the fact that we want teachers to use technology in appropriate ways in their classrooms because this is the world in which their students live. Or will live, if they don’t already. Even in my overly small school division.
Finally, my blogroll over to the right there has some good stuff to check out. Feel free and enjoy.
~ until next time~
2 responses so far
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I’m curious about your point that the focus is on technology because it is what students experience in their lives.
They experience A LOT of things not brought into the schools. Past generations of students did A LOT of things outside of school (in their lives so to speak) that was not brought into the school.
Is this a bad thing? Is that really “the” reason to bring technology into the classroom? I would think it is about the improvement of teaching and learning.
If it is about their lives outside of school, technology is simply a small part so what else needs to be brought into schools?
Ryan–It’s not that technology doesn’t or can’t improve teaching and learning–it can. I think many things can improve teaching and learning and here I’m not simply talking about better standardized test scores. Technology that isn’t well implemented in a classroom can inhibit teaching and learning, but a passionate teacher who loves their subject and chooses excellent reading materials, assigns compelling and challenging assignments can do so much for the improvement of teaching and learning.
Yes technology is a small part of their lives but if they are using it in their lives outside of school, then how do we change and adapt that to the world within school? It has to be done well and not haphazardly, with our teachers understanding how all of this can work with their subject and their style of teaching.
Plus all of this gets back to the big question of what is education for? Is it to help people become autonomous human beings, capable of learning new things, confident in their person knowing that they don’t know it all? Or is it to turn out students who have no real desire to learn anything new since it will be tested?
Thanks for your comments. They are good questions and for me this summer, I have been mulling over some of them.