Apply and Discover 2.2

My thesis in my short paper was quite simply that as teachers, we have chosen to educate students and meet their needs.  Knowledge of the students in front of each teacher is a vital piece of information needed to teach them effectively.  As Prensky (2001) tells us, today's students learn and process information differently than students of the past.  Students are part of a world that is- and will increasingly be- based on technology.  If research tells us that today's students need more technologically-based learning to truly become independent learners and productive citizens in their futures, then it is our obligation as teachers- not our choice- to incorporate technology into our classrooms.

Many teachers are unsure of ways that they could introduce more technology, whether due to lack of knowledge or lack of available equipment.  Even in a school that has limited technology, there are several ways that technology can be used to introduce and assess learning that will meet the needs of the diverse student populations that most teachers have. Simple accommodations such as word processing for students who have difficulty writing and speech-recognition software for students who may be dyslexic are easy ways to meet students' needs, but there are also ways to implement technology that can adapt better to each student's learning styles.  If students are more engaged in the classroom they will learn more, and technology has been shown to be the best way for teachers to accomplish this task.

NCLB often creates an attitude with teachers that they have to cover their curriculum in a "checklist" style which can actually promote more traditional classrooms of lecturing and note-taking.  But with just an accessible computer lab, teachers can find diverse ways to instruct students.  One method is to show students how the concepts that they are learning relate to the real world.  For example, instead of teaching Newton's laws of motion in the "traditional" ways, students can be given a prompt to research, like car safety features, amusement park rides, or some other topic in which they may already have an interest.  If a student learned about the motion related to these subjects, the student would be exposed to the fundamentals of all three laws of motion without the teacher ever having to lecture about them.  Independent research can meet the learning needs of all member of the very heterogeneously-grouped classrooms that most teachers have.  By choosing their own topics, students can apply their knowledge to the real world as well as be able to access material on appropriate reading levels.  If a website was "boring," it could easily be changed for a new one, which can increase attention and motivation.  All of these factors assist in creating authentic, independent, and meaningful learning.

As a teacher of Language Arts, it is important that my students are able to be literate in the traditional ways of reading and writing.  In a content-centered classroom, this expectation might often be accomplished by reading a story, discussing it, and then writing about it.  As stated by Schrum and Levin (2009), the team "literacy" is evolving.  Students need to show literacy by presenting more skills than just being able to read words across the pages of a book, and that can be done by using technology to present material and assess students in ways that will gain interest.  Instead of just round-robin-reading Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, a teacher could easily go to You Tube to view the video so the student can hear the passion in his voice and feel the emotions that it will evoke.  Students could then use digital cameras or Flip Video cameras to product their own speeches about current issues that they face.  In lieu of a traditional book report, students can be asked to use Movie Maker to create a book trailer that shows that they understand the theme of the book using pictures, music, AND words.

Instead of technology being thought of as "another thing to do" by teachers, we need to begin to look at it as a useful tool that will actually help make our jobs easier to do.  Technology can be used to present material in ways that can be understood by any learning style and level, which will create an environment where students want to learn.  Technology can be used so that even students with learning difficulties can be assessed on what they learned and not have the results skewed by assessments that measure writing skills as much as they measure content learning.  Technology is not going away and if it has been shown to benefit our students, it needs to be used.  It's our job.

 

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants- Part 1. On the Horizon , 9 (5).

Schrum, L., & Levin, B. B. (2009). Leading 21st Century Schools: Harnessing Technology for Engagement and Achievement. Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press.