Thing 16: Teach Digital

The first video by Marco Torres was unavailable both at school and home but after searching Google found and viewed. It was interesting because I viewed the Robinson video before the the Torres. Reemphasized the point. Teachers are very successful students. They learned by lecture, reading textbooks, and writing papers. We tend to teach how we are taught. That worked for 100 years but kids learn differently and with different tools. They can demonstrate their learning in radically different ways. They can communicate in ways that were not even thought of 20 years ago. Ways that are blocked at school. Writing means writing a paper not a blog or scripting a movie. Just read an interesting article "America's Newest Profession: Blogging". The statistics are amazing. People are writing...just not on paper.

Sir Ken Robinson's speak "Do Schools Kill Creativity" was right on target and very enjoyable. Creativity takes time, it doesn't fit into a nice box and you can't test it with a multiple choice quiz. Our schools are more and more aimed at the college bound student. Some of our kids are not college material. That doesn't mean they are not intelligent. Some are very intelligent. We don't seem to value making things, fixing things, creating things. Some kids learn in spite of school.

"No future left behind" continued the theme of schools constraining student creativity. As I reflected on the student voices, it occurred to me that many of the creative activities available to student are after school. Drama/musicals/plays, robotics, Odyssey of the Mind etc. and that those are some of the activities that are most prized by students.

Technology is not the complete answer but it is certainly part of the answer. Schools/ education needs to change. It needs to be allowed to change in a meaningful way. One size doesn't fit all. Another interesting pov comes from this speech from Danah Boyd "Living and Learning with Social Media".

"Many of you have come to this symposium to hear about all of the amazing new fangled things that are happening because of technology. There are indeed some neat things going on. But, at the end of the day, the today's teens are not that much different than yesterday's teens as a result of technology.

Today's teens are still more interested in their friends than their lessons. They're still resistant to power and authority at variable levels. They still gossip, bully, flirt, joke around, and hang out. The underlying dynamics are fairly consistent. That said, technology is inflecting these practices in unique ways."