Teachers in Tech
A long time ago (like, what, 3 years? yeah, my life moves quickly) I taught a couple of summer classes for teachers. I taught basic web technologies-- an intro to HTML, the basics of setting up a website. I was shocked to discover that I could happily cram so much content into one week. One teacher even told me that she had learned more in that one week than in an entire month during some crazy course in Nashville (for which she had a huge 3-ring binder full of info).
Over the past 48 hours I saw my folks at Download Squad turn a tangential tech post into something really quite wonderful. If you're a teacher, please read Five ways to improve technology in education. It isn't complete, it isn't the result of years of research. It is a blog post, written by a person who loves tech and lives education. And I consider that alone a fine thing.
The bottom line in the story: teachers aren't keeping pace with technology changes. Many people already know this, don't they? When I got a Microsoft Works document a few weeks ago, I became painfully aware of this.
I've reached out to some guy in the local education scene to offer a big, free seminar to show any and all Knox county educators how, by using free and simple online tools, they could rapidly increase their effectiveness and just be better educators (which also means having more time to do fun things). Unfortunately he never responded.
But I still have the dream of showing people how easy this stuff can be! For example, why lock yourself into some ancient, proprietary format like Works? Not even Word will open those! Although Zamzar will convert darn near anything (and that's what I ultimately used to convert the Works doc into a Word doc) and do it for free. But why bother when you can get a free Gmail account, which gives you a couple of gigabytes of storage, plus gives you access to Google Docs. This would give teachers a way to easily collaborate on projects, ideas, routine tasks, etc. Plus, you can easily export to popular Office formats!
And that's the tip of the iceberg. What really amazes me is when there is so much opportunity out there, but so little is actually used. Much like our brains, conditioned to work in a linear, logical fashion through years of "training," we under-utilize the most powerful tool: our mind. A pity, really.
Over the past 48 hours I saw my folks at Download Squad turn a tangential tech post into something really quite wonderful. If you're a teacher, please read Five ways to improve technology in education. It isn't complete, it isn't the result of years of research. It is a blog post, written by a person who loves tech and lives education. And I consider that alone a fine thing.
The bottom line in the story: teachers aren't keeping pace with technology changes. Many people already know this, don't they? When I got a Microsoft Works document a few weeks ago, I became painfully aware of this.
I've reached out to some guy in the local education scene to offer a big, free seminar to show any and all Knox county educators how, by using free and simple online tools, they could rapidly increase their effectiveness and just be better educators (which also means having more time to do fun things). Unfortunately he never responded.
But I still have the dream of showing people how easy this stuff can be! For example, why lock yourself into some ancient, proprietary format like Works? Not even Word will open those! Although Zamzar will convert darn near anything (and that's what I ultimately used to convert the Works doc into a Word doc) and do it for free. But why bother when you can get a free Gmail account, which gives you a couple of gigabytes of storage, plus gives you access to Google Docs. This would give teachers a way to easily collaborate on projects, ideas, routine tasks, etc. Plus, you can easily export to popular Office formats!
And that's the tip of the iceberg. What really amazes me is when there is so much opportunity out there, but so little is actually used. Much like our brains, conditioned to work in a linear, logical fashion through years of "training," we under-utilize the most powerful tool: our mind. A pity, really.
Labels: education, solution, technology
posted by Victor Agreda, Jr. at
8:51 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home