Blog of my Choice 3

Edutopia

21st-century schools need 21st-century technology.

I enjoyed reading the Edutopia blog called Adopt and Adapt: Shaping Tech for the Classroom by Marc Prenskybecause it gives you a good perspective on where you are in using technology. I have only been teaching for 10 years and most of the early years were strictly PE, thus, I hardly had much to do with a chalkboard or even an overhead. My start on computers involved using documents and hotmail and even developing a website one time, but really had no idea what I was doing. Then along came Outlook and organized my life in a big way. Further down the road I learned PowerPoint and that became useful for presentations although looking back, my early PPTs were not much more exciting than the overheads with the bullet points. Reading this article made me realize that even though I have learned new technologies and applied them, I am basically still doing old things in old ways. It hasn’t changed my way of teaching, just gave me a new different device to do the same thing.

As I read further, I was relieved to see that I didn’t completely fail to adapt and I have recently started to use do some old things in new ways. Much of this is outside of education, such as downloading music and videos. However, in school I use a lot of video, but I also have students make videos. I am also running a blog for the environmental group and although this is new to me, and at the moment is nothing more than a place to catch up on what has been done, I hope to soon adapt it to enhance student learning.

The area where I struggle, and it seems where many struggle, is doing new things in new ways. I am learning how to use a wiki now and although that can be used to do old things in new ways, I hope to use it in a teaching and learning environment that is very different from what I am used to. The students will have much more control and ownership and we will build and learn together. I suspect I might even learn more from them. It will hopefully allow the students to be more creative and work collaboratively, which is something different from the standard model. In my PE classes I do a unit on multi-cultural games and the students become the teachers and I become a student. I take a lot of pleasure in watching them take control learn in a different way. However, I am comfortable letting go in that setting. Perhaps, it is my lack of confidence dealing with technology that holds me back from doing the same. However, my mind is made up and I will be taking the plunge!