Schools and school districts who have come to the personal computing party decades late now have conjured a cheap less-empowering way to produce an illusion of modernity. They call it "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) or "Bring Your Own Technology" (BYOT) and it's a terribly reckless idea for the following reasons.
When learning moves to higher order and more critical thinking levels, students tend to internalize information and knowledge more and it "sticks" with them for longer - so it is more likely to become something that is applicable to other situations or to be generalized and applied.
Right now, too many teachers are using technology in this more simplified, lower level way. Instead, we need to be pushing students more to make predictions and take their thinking a step further. I wonder if we, teachers, are pushing ourselves when it comes to thinking or are we simply teaching the same old, same old in the ways we learned eons ago...
Why is it so hard to raise our expectations that students WILL have this technology? If we consistently expect it, they will - we expect them to have a pencil...
I was meeting with a teacher this week who had a wonderful lesson using a few websites to ID European countries and find information about each country. There was a wee bit of critical thinking added into the mix of the assignment but I was still 'hungry for more' and feeling the need to nudge him and his students to the next level. The green highlighted information is sort of what I was looking for to nudge him onward with in his lesson.