February 2011 |
Volume
68
|
Number
5
Teaching
Screenagers
Pages
7-7
Screenagers: Making the Connections
Marge Scherer
"Education has to change. We can't pull kids into
learning
in school if they are engaged in a different
world outside school."
"If you don't know how to use technology in
class, you are
in trouble. But, of course, technology is a
double-edged sword. You can use it
poorly, or
you can use it well."
The principals speaking were two of the
candidates for the
ASCD Outstanding Young Educator Award, which will
be presented in March at
ASCD's Annual Conference in San Francisco. A
group of us were interviewing 13
finalists—both administrators and teachers—over
the course of a few weeks, and
we were
talking to them about their leadership, their creativity, their whole
child philosophy, their impact on student
achievement, and, of course, their
technology
use. All the educators spoke to us via Adobe ConnectPro, a two-way
technology that allowed us to see, hear, and
record them in their
schools—whether in New York, Oregon, the
Philippines, or places in between—while
they
viewed us in our meeting room in Alexandria, Virginia.
"If we continue to treat our teachers like children, what will become of our children?" Although this article is very confrontational, it does offer some solution-focused thinking. Teachers should be pushing our profession in these ways--prompting dialogue and debate among our communities and our faculties.
