The authors found that “instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage” than either purely online or entirely face-to-face instruction.
Members of any profession need to communicate and collaborate with colleagues to understand and improve their skills. Face-to-Face collaboration is personal, but is limited by boundaries of time and space. Participants must have a common time and place for collaboration. Digital collaboration has no bounds of time or space, and collaboration can take place anytime with anyone, anywhere.
Technology is not a generational thing, it is a learning thing. It may be outside many educators’ comfort zones, but comfort zones are the biggest obstacles to education reform.
The time has come for educators to accept that they no longer have a choice about technology. To maintain relevance as educators, they need to employ relevant technology learning tools for education, connect and collaborate with other professionals to improve their skills and knowledge within their profession, and use PLNs to improve their profession and hold off the barbarian politicians and business people banging down the gates of education
I think that it is reasonable to take technology "time outs," to have environments and maybe even times where the family interacts with each other and not the outside world through texts. It's sort of a return to the dinner table as a place where you learn how to engage in face-to-face, meaningful contact. Put your tech aside. You can return to it afterwards.
Social networking tools play a powerful role in building teacher learning networks, but educators still yearn for the chance to gather face to face to polish their craft.
"For a child who is comfortable socially, [technology] will not change their ability to interact, and they'll use this tool as a way to get even more social," she said. "And a child who's not naturally comfortable socially may turn to these screens to interact, and they won't get practice [face to face]."
I’m not yet willing to dive educationally into a social tool currently dominated by silliness and pablum. That said, my argument is not one of a “digital divide” between students and teachers
some folks freak about digital communications between students and teachers. And yet they think nothing about the face-to-face conversation in the hall where no one else is listening. This is merely lack of comfort with something new.
Stand by your interactions as a professional and a model for children, and frankly- there’s a digital record to go along as a bonus.