Techblog

If I am teaching in Tokyo, Japan I better be technologicaly savvy. If I am teaching in Zion, Illinois, I better be technologically savvy. I was standing in line last night at the store and the little boy in front of me said to his mother as she answered her cell phone, "Tell daddy I have a laptop." He is aproximaly six by my guess. He was holding the child laptop in his hands. In time it will not matter, all children will eventualy have access to technology and as teachers in my opinion, we need to be ready to teach these tech savvy students. I pay attention to what my friends kids are doing when it comes to technology because it fascinates me. Ricky at age three would be found on the computer in the middle of the night by his mom. He was well aware of how to operate the mouse and sign on to play his game. Allison at age four knows how to log in with her name, knows what the Internet icon looks like, does a google search for "straw" which brings up Strawberry Shortcake's website and childrens games for her to play. http://www.agkidzone.com/meet_strawberry.action
By the time these children reach first grade I want to be able to relate to them in my teaching as well as in who they are as "little people". I like this term "little people" that my friends uses when she refers to her children because it helps me to stop and take time to see where they are in their understanding of life. I agree with Marc Prensky author of the article Listen to the Natives. Educational Leadership in a few areas because he approaches children, in my opinion, as "little people." I like his thinking because of my vivid memories of wanting text and images in books to "come to life" if you will when I was an elementary student. I wanted the adventure of life in the classroom, not the stale paper copy of a handout or watching someone chalk up the black board with facts. I think we do need to remember to teach children the simple pleasures of life which do not require technology, such as making a snow angle, or rolling down a grassy hill at recess, or feeling. There are time I think technology can be a little concerning when it lends itself to an anti social direction. Howerever, with that said, I see many ideas presented by Presky that I know work well. For instance, I will use a personal exmaple. When I graduated highschool, I went to a community college learn to type and the class still used typewriters. I hated it because there were women in the class and I was young in comparison and they could type 80 words per minutes and I felt lost. A year later, I learned that the same class was being taught via computer. I signed up, took the class, loved the game of typing well enough to get good scores on my practices and homework. By the end of my class the teacher asked me to be her teaching assistant. I of course received an A in the class. Far better than the incomplete I received the year prior when I left the building feeling like a failure. As Prensky mentions in his arcticle, Listen to the Natives. Educational Leadership. http://www.ascd.org/authors/ed_lead/el200512_prensky.html "One elementary school in Colorado, for example, takes its student on a virtual journey to a distant planet in a spaceship powered by knowledge. If the students don't have enough knowledge to more the ship, they need to find it--in one another." This approach keeps the social interaction in tact and uses technolgy and a game to drive the students learning. I also find the Presky questions "Does anyone do anything on the Web that is relevant to what we're discussing?: or "Can you think of any ezamples of this problem in your computer games?" to be positive in relating to students as well as functional in learning.