Two ideas came to mind as I viewed the videos and read the article: opportunity missed and disservice.With tears in my eyes, I revisited the feelings I have had for quite some time about the current state of education in our country. We teach kids daily with an obsolete set of tools. We require of them the memorization of names, dates and events that most of them can find when/if needed. It’s the bigger picture of information assimilation we continually miss. We should be teaching kids that we value their ways of communicating and interacting with each other and the world rather than stifling the activities in which they are both interested and competent. We immerse them in the tools of a time they are both unfamiliar with and abhorrent to, forcing them into a box with few windows—and those windows that do exist are teacher-made!
I am so fortunate to work in an environment where all of our students have computer access throughout the day. I have long wanted to become better versed in the use of Web 2.0 tools to enhance their learning experiences. My Current Issues students have already created blogs and I’m developing a timeline project using Voice Threads for my U.S. History students.
If we resist embarking on a different way of educating our digital-age kids, we fail them.
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"If we resist embarking on a different way of educating our digital-age kids, we fail them."
Yes, you are preaching to this particular choir, but you can't imaging how much this touched me to see this in your blog post. The students we teach today think, learn, and play very differently from how we did growing up. We absolutely cannot continue to teach them as we were taught. We're not only going to fail our kids, we're going to drive the joy of learning out of them. At least that is my humble opinion.
You are in a very fortunate situation in that you teach in basically a 1-1 environment. The opportunities you have with such access to technology(within the time constraints of the curriculum you need to cover)are broad. You spoke of opportunities and I think you've got a great one here given the tool set you have and this course you're taking.
As an aside, one of my favorite articles is by Mark Prensky and it's called Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. It's ties in rather well with your post and delves into the theory that we're losing our kids because of how we're teaching them.
Caroline O'Bannon
http://cobannon.edublogs.org/
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