If you remember this song, you're at least as old as I am. Congratulations! You also were a teenager in the 70's. You might have seen the first "games" as a type in and wait, maybe as long as twenty minutes for the server to process and return the results of your hero's action. You saw the first personal computers in the early 80s, back when a green screen was an amazing development, worked with single density, single sided floppy disks (the 5 1/4" ones), fussed with modems and dial-up and people's complaints about constant busy signals and endless load time. In the 90s, computing was the World Wide Wait. Now it's something else. Something faster. And tomorrow, it will be something else again. Faster? How much faster?
Which brings us to the changes needed in education. I'm not sure we can be fast enough. I do know that, as fast and as adaptable as children are, we need to at least try to meet them halfway. And with all this Friedman "Flat World" talk (and having seen my own family clobbered by it with IBM's moving most of its workforce offshore -- but that's for another blog), we have no choice but to bring the New World to the next generation in our educational methods.
The value of what we teach endures. Reading, writing, speaking. Critical thinking. We need to acknowledge, though, that our students read, write and speak online. They don't even want to make phone calls; it takes too long.
I'd like to see a Twitter discussion of literature. Or a class blog, where students were required to post comments. I'd like to see a final project that asked a student to maintain their own blog exploring "Huckleberry Finn," point by point in successive posts, and illustrated with images from the Library of Congress, and supported by articles found in a Gale database.
A traditional teacher might argue that student achievement will be compromised. But an innovative teacher will understand that we cannot only teach our students to be classically trained scholars anymore.
We also need to teach them how to learn and to adapt. We need to teach them survival skills for a world we cannot imagine.
I hope that we will teach them to be what we are not: the Future.
What a well written post. It is motivating and yet simple enough for all teachers to understand what tools you are speking of.
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