Technology in Learning

The other day at lunch I listened to a group of teachers discuss students who did not hear a thing they said during their lessons. They complained of students not facing them while they were reading a book or students who fiddled with things on their desks while the teacher was “teaching”. They were discussing ways to change the students. I was thinking of ways to change the lesson, not the students. As the discussion went on, I did mention that children these days have different influences on them than we did. They have grown up in front of the television where information is fed to them in 30 second intervals. Most play video games daily which stimulate many senses but often do not require much thinking and certainly not creative thinking.

Here was my opportunity to work with these teachers to engage their students in learning. However, one or two people in a school working for this purpose will slowly affect the way lessons are delivered. The way we educate our teachers needs to change. I see “content memorization” valued more now than ever before. Are No Child Left Behind and SOL’s responsible for this? I’m sure they have a heavy correlation with “content memorization”. I think we’ve moved more toward memorization than when I was a student. I sat in a professional development session for staff where the presenter emphasized that students needed to know how to “interpret” data on a graph not how to create the graph or apply the information they gain from the graph. (Yes, “interpret” is the SOL.) This presentation is coming to our school from our central office. We are telling our teachers to stick to the SOL which usually means “memorize for the SOL”. Is this what we should be emphasizing for the global economy? I agree with Alan November that we need to move toward applying our information. In today’s world, you need to understand concepts not memorize. Information is only a few keystrokes away. Students need to know how to search, synthesize and evaluate the information they need when they need it.