Sunday, November 22, 2009
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Teaching with Technology
Okay, so the fact that I'm a student teacher two days a week with a mentor teacher doing most of the teaching should be the first indicator that my experiences so far don't represent how things will be in the future. But it's a good place to start. Having spent so many weeks exploring ways to incorporate new technologies into classroom instruction hasn't really changed my mind about the essence of teaching, that it's really about the interaction between the student, the teacher, and the content. With or without twitter, that reality is constant and it should be a comfort to us all. Perhaps when I'm a full-time teacher in my own classroom, I'll view technology as something more than just a nice bonus because I'll have total control over how to best use it. But for now, the best thing, by far, about technology and teaching is the sheer volume of INCREDIBLE resources available online for teachers to steal. And I mean steal in the legal sense! Part of me is skeptical about the purpose of designing anything from scratch anymore. Everything has already been done and it's likely been done by someone far smarter and more experienced than me. Why create a brand new worksheet on Jacksonian Democracy when the National Endowment for the Humanities has an entire site devoted to lesson plans and classroom materials on the subject? What's the purpose of developing assessments from beginning to end when countless sites make countless examples available for anyone to use? Why not take what's already out there (and what has been shown to work) and modify it for your own purposes?
Being a new teacher, I think I can safely speak for many of us that the biggest concern I have relates to content mastery. My mentor said that it can easily take five years or so before you really feel comfortable that you "know" your stuff and can teach it without studying too much beforehand. Five years is a long time! Planning lessons and units is really challenging and I don't think that I would have been able to produce the level of quality that I want without the help of all these online resources for teachers. No one wants to rely on the textbook all the time. Now I can go to one of any number of great sites to find specific information that I need about a specific event or concept or person. For learning the content, there's nothing better than having web access. Now, I don't suggest that everything out there is reliable. Of course not! As a history person, I had better not depend on resources that I tell my students to back away from slowly. But in a pinch, you can almost always find what you're looking for. And if you're developing something more indepth, it's absolutely invaluable.
I do love technology. But so far I love it behind the scenes!
Being a new teacher, I think I can safely speak for many of us that the biggest concern I have relates to content mastery. My mentor said that it can easily take five years or so before you really feel comfortable that you "know" your stuff and can teach it without studying too much beforehand. Five years is a long time! Planning lessons and units is really challenging and I don't think that I would have been able to produce the level of quality that I want without the help of all these online resources for teachers. No one wants to rely on the textbook all the time. Now I can go to one of any number of great sites to find specific information that I need about a specific event or concept or person. For learning the content, there's nothing better than having web access. Now, I don't suggest that everything out there is reliable. Of course not! As a history person, I had better not depend on resources that I tell my students to back away from slowly. But in a pinch, you can almost always find what you're looking for. And if you're developing something more indepth, it's absolutely invaluable.
I do love technology. But so far I love it behind the scenes!
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