I have been involved in a few discussions recently about
technology’s role in education. I hear everything from, “I just want kids to be
able to type,” “They need to be able to pass the PARCC,” “I want them to be able
to make a PowerPoint.” You get the idea. I have done TONS of reading and
research on the idea of, What do we really want kids to be able to do? Many
states and counties make this very clear, mine does not. In all of this
research I have found out some things that have thrown me onto different paths,
or simply just made me think. There is an infographic put out by Rosetta Stone
about Technology in the Classroom. Most of it contains things that we have
heard before, but one bullet point on one page caught my attention. It is
talking about how students learn differently in the digital age. There are
obviously hundreds of articles, papers and websites devoted to this. What caught
my attention was, immediate feedback. I have been successful at convincing most
teachers that the skills that are gained through integrating technology into
the classroom are useful as students matriculate up through their education and
eventual careers. However, I think that I have been less successful in showing
that students are actually coming into the classroom with different expectations
around gathering and retaining information. I think this idea of “immediate
feedback” really brings this home. Time for an example. If I give a quiz to
students, let’s say on Thursday. I take it home to grade it, but get side
tracked, have to do laundry, deal with family stuff, whatever. I attempt to do
it on Friday during planning, but a parent calls and now my planning period is
gone. So I, like a good teacher, spend my weekend grading a quiz on fractions.
Give it back to kids on Monday. Here is the issue. I taught math on Friday, so
we are already one lesson beyond the quiz. What if on Friday they “got it.”
This data is already so outdated. Plus, it is not at all useful to students.
They had no concept of what to study, or how to get more practice. If they play
an online math game, or do an online quiz, they know immediately. I know immediately.
I can totally change my Friday lesson if needed. They know right where they
stand. Also, I didn’t have to spend my weekend grading papers!
However, it is so much bigger than that. If I want to know
what year the Declaration of Independence was written, I can ask Siri, or
Google, or Cortana (insert your brand of OS platform personality). I don’t ever
have to wonder about dates, facts, who was that actress in that movie? I can
have that information instantly. So can students, and they are used to it. The
idea of walking up to the library, looking in a catalogue, finding the book, flipping
through and index, reading a page, sounds exhausting to someone who is used to
just saying “OK Google.” So they don’t do it. Some would brand this as lazy. I
don’t. I think it is using tools, and being efficient. That student who didn’t
go all the way to the library now has, probably, a half an hour more time to do
something with this new information. I now have time to fold my laundry and put
it away, instead of leaving it in a huge pile next to my bed. OK, so what does
this mean for teaching? If students, and teachers, are used to immediate
feedback, they also have, or will have, the tools to use that feedback to change
course, or create action. So it is the paradigm shift, of we need to not just
know information, we need to know what to do with it. Information is so easy to
obtain, that it is no longer a skill to be able to know a date, or name in
history. The new skill is knowing WHY that date and person are important, how
they relate to the whole story. Also, now that you know this, how are you going
to use it to better yourself or others? This is the shift. Obtaining information,
or “learning” information is not the objective. That is what we all did in
school, we learned how to find specific information, how to memorize it. This
is no longer a necessary skill. Why are we still teaching it? If you really
believe in this idea, your textbooks become obsolete; dictionaries and times
tables charts become useless. This shift in mindset is important. It is also
not happening. How do we convince teachers that the way that information in obtained
and processed, in 2016 is like no other time in history, and that teaching and
learning needs to adjust?