"So I ran across this Smart Ease of Use video in the course of one of our threads in a PLP cohort and I have to say, I can’t seem to shake it. I mean, maybe I’m missing something here, but if this is a vision of “transformative” technology, we’re in some serious trouble. Worse, if this marketing piece actually does the job and creates sales of Smart boards, we’re in even bigger trouble.
Is this really a vision of classrooms and learning that we aspire to? Is it all about being “easy”? And what does it say when the manufacturer of one of the most popular pieces of technologies in schools presents this picture for what teachers and students should be doing in schools?
Help me…what am I missing?"
This new technology is not so new. I have seen it used in my own college courses and it is more frustrating than useful because the marker does not work as accurately or as easily as a regular dry-erase marker. The technology is not ready to work at the same pace we would like it to. A much simpler solution is to combine a PowerPoint presentation with a dry-erase board. The presentation should be projected onto a dry-erase board and then a simple dry-erase marker can be used to circle and highlight information being presented and quickly wiped away when the presenter is ready to move on to the next slide. I have seen this method work very well and recommend it to anyone that is presenting information that needs to be manipulated in front of the audience.
"What I’m finding more and more as I visit schools that are getting more serious about “change” is that they have someone at the top who is willing to focus on the learning and not on the other crap."
Great! Learning is what education is about! It’s not about funding and numbers...I mean it is, but the funding is simply necessary and the numbers will come when the students' learning is the focus. If the students are actually learning the material they will test better, naturally. If people are less concerned with politics (especially within the school) and more concerned with how well the students are doing then better teaching methods will rise to the surface because more people will be trying something new and then we'll know if that particular way works or not! How will we ever progress if we are stuck living in our heads? We need to experiment! We need to get a little messy! We need to adapt the system to fit today's growing needs and the best way to do that is trial and error (and analysis) so get to tryin!
"Right now, most schools are making what I think is a bad choice by not immersing their students into these online learning environments which are creating all sorts of opportunities for us to learn. In doing so, they’re implicitly saying that technology is an option. It’s not."
Imagine a business mogul such as Donald Trump or a major organization like Disney saying that they would have nothing to do with all this new fan-dangled technology and refused to acknowledge its awesome potential. Well, Trump would be poor and Disney would be out of business because companies like Pixar would easily be able to replace it. Ignoring technology, its global reach, and its potential is like continuing to believe the Earth is flat when we have satellite photos of the Earth as a sphere. We are so far beyond the question of whether or not technology is useful that it blows my mind people are still treating it as a choice rather than a necessity. That is like saying speaking and understanding English is a choice when doing business with people that only use English. It definitely is a choice and definitely is not necessary on a small scale but it one wants to be successful one had better make the adjustment and fast because the technology of today is already being made obsolete by the technology of tomorrow. The train's movin'...either get on or get out of the way.
No comments:
Post a Comment