"JE: But you're not saying that technology is a bad thing, to have it there is a good thing, isn't it?
AS: Well, absolutely. I think technology is there to stay. Technology has huge potential to transform, to fundamentally transform, learning processes. You know it can create a much more open pedagogical environment, it can connect the home environment and the school environment, it can give students access to the most advanced knowledge, anywhere, anytime, rather than giving them a textbook that was printed last year and maybe designed five years ago.
So, there's huge potential for technology to transform learning, but what our report clearly shows is that's not what's happening today."
I define technological fluency as "the ability to determine and use the
appropriate technology tool(s) for the task at hand in a manner that allows
seamless transfer of created objects and documents to flow easily between the
selected tools without outside intervention."
Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) attempts to capture some of the essential qualities of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge.
"I'm so tired of having the integration of technology into learning overlooked
because it's "too hard". As
educators -
actual professional
educators
, who actually go into classrooms every day and teach for a
living - we do
NOT
have the luxury of choosing whether we
should be integrating technology, or whether we want to learn more about it, or
whether we think it's relevant to the learning process.
It
is
, it's part of the job and if people don't think so, then they ought
to be getting a copy of the Saturday paper and looking for a something else to
do where they CAN be selective about what part of the job they are willing to
take seriously without it impacting on our future generations."
Given the realities of our modern age and the demands of our
children’s future, is it really okay to allow teachers to choose whether or not
they incorporate modern technologies into their instruction?
Teaching practices slowly evolved from communicating personal knowledge on the blackboard to prescribed text books. Contemporary teachers are now faced with a multifaceted array of delivery tools. Schools need to make explicit to their teachers biannual benchmarks of what Information Technologies should be employed in their classrooms. Leaving it up to the teacher is insufficient. Only 2 out of 10 teachers are innovators. These teachers will have passion and commitment to the school. They will drive innovation. 6 out of 10 will turn up and put time into their work. They operate on the status quo. They need assistance to innovate. The remaining 2 out of 10 will not contribute.
The Innovative teachers should be employed by the school as agents of continual change, with the objective to raise the benchmarks of Information Technologies employed. The bulk of the teachers Performance Management should be tied to the expected benchmarks. The non contributors should be actively squeezed out of the school.
If schools do not provide the appropriate and relevant service they become irrelevant and their students are dis-serviced.
The term personal web means a collection technologies that offer the ability to reorganize, configure and manage online content rather than just viewing it. The personal web emerged with the advent of Web 2.0 and includes innovations such as personalized home pages, RSS feeds and aggregators, and customizable widget. (Horizon Report, 2009)
Know what kids think. Know what kids want.
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"Parents of older children face similar challenges - for instance, whether it's acceptable for their teen to text at the dinner table, or whether it's tolerable for a teen to peer at his laptop when someone is trying to address him. Essentially, we wonder, just how much technology should be allowed in our lives and those of our kids?"
"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it-and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
Digital Natives
The real bombshell which will be hitting primary schools now and secondary schools in the next decade is a whole bunch of Noahs. These kids have grown up with YouTube (which has only been around since 2005) and all the web 2.0 which we, as pure digital immigrants, are trying to adapt to. At the same time their parents, having become comfortable with computers and the Internet, have felt confident enough to expose them to this technology at every earlier ages. The result is likely to be a wave of genuine digital natives that I am not sure education is ready for.
"Students today have instant access to information through technology and the web, manage their own acquisition of knowledge through informal learning, and have progressed beyond consumers of content to become producers and publishers. As a result, traditional teaching and learning methods are becoming less effective at engaging students and motivating them to achieve."
"The use of robotics as an educational tool is growing in popularity. Advances in technology have resulted in the development of generic robotic construction kits for use in grade school (K-12) environments."