Lit Review 2: Keeping Technology at Bay? Not anymore.

http://chronicle.com/article/Reaching-the-Last-Technology/123659/

From: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Author: Jeffrey R. Young
Date: July 24. 2010


Throughout this course, I have continued to have a hint of suspicion that technology doesn't always need to be included into curriculum and that a classroom devoid of tech-teachings could be presented and received on the same level of interest-holding and flexible lesson plans that other, technology-based pedagogy provides.


Yet sometimes it doesn't take much to change someone's thinking and in my case, the following sentence really hit home:

But a number of teaching experts hope to encourage professors to think of their teaching as something that needs constant care and feeding.

Once again, a case is made for integrating technology in the classroom and this way this article presented it finally made sense to me. Like most everything else in life, teachings must be aware of how times change and what they can do to nuture their lesson plans and keep their classrooms alive. The article also compares a teacher that shuns technology to a doctor that uses the same intruments, medicines and techniques from one decade to the next. Who would want to go to such a doctor that didn't want to be up-to-date with the latest? The same can be said for a teacher that won't change when the world of education and how to apply it is changing all around them.


So, even though people may be afraid of change, it is imperative that technology be incorporated into lesson plans throughout all grade levels. Technology is not going to go away. Of course there's a balance between using technology in the classroom effectively and using many of its forms incorrectly and to rely too heavily upon, causing us to become multi-taskers who do all things poorly compared to a person focused on one, maybe two things at the most, at a single time. But even the teachers who have been in the classroom for 30, 40 years, can become students themselves and "keep up" with how the compostion of today's classrooms are structured.


As one of "non-techie converts" stated in the article about one of her first experiences teaching an online course:

I'm very surprised how well I like it and how well you get to know your students

I would think that in a short amount of time from now, technology in the classroom will be accepted rather than that invasive, newfangled thing that strikes uncertainty or even fear, into some of the world's educators.