Second try

Learning isn’t easy! Students today must take in and process substantial amounts of information while keeping up with the demands and distractions of their fast paced world. But teaching isn’t easy either! Teachers have the challenge of engaging their students to the point where they can focus on the material at hand, imbibing information and exploring new ideas and concepts. A lack of communication between the two sides of the educational spectrum has the potential to create a technological barrier, often making teaching and learning irrelevant and inefficient. Teachers and students must work together, using the latest technology and sharing individual skills and interests in order to create an educational environment that is both effective and exciting.

As technology first started to appear in the classroom, the students were the ones eager to venture into the new realms of opportunity that the Internet and its many applications presented. Teachers, still teaching the importance of neat handwriting and independent research in the library, were weary of a technological dependency that would erase mental math, proper vocabulary / spelling, and intensive research from their curriculums forever more. However, it is clear that in using the alternative medias technology has to offer, students and teachers have actually found ways to learn together, and gain deeper insights than those neatly phrased in textbooks.

In the article entitled “Write the Truth” (2007), a fifth grade teacher was presented with a teaching moment when his class wondered how many of the presidents of the United States owned slaves before deciding that slavery really was not such a good thing. The students, when asked what should be done to uncover the truth, were eager to check history books and the Internet. What they found was unsettling, even to these young students. Nowhere in their history text was any mention of racism or national leaders who subscribed to the practice. By employing detailed searches on well-known search engines, the students were able to develop a list of slave-owning presidents. The students were distressed that the textbook writers did not want them learning the harsh reality about the revered leaders, and took action to ask that the text be revised and clarified. In this scenario, the Internet was a valuable tool and allowed the students to actively participate in deeper learning.

In the same way, two sister elementary school classrooms from Canada and Greece were communicating with each other online in order to learn more about the opposite culture. The article “DiaLogos: A Sister Class Exchange between Greece and Canada” (2007) explains that amidst an effort to provide more information on Ancient Greece, a student realized that some of the Parthenon’s wreckage was unfairly named for the British lord who took them. This spurred the class in Greece to write to the editors of the magazine who had published this erroneous information. The confidence that this effort provided the students must have helped them to recognize the power they had as individuals to take a stand and make a difference – and it might not have happened if the intrigued Canadian student had not emailed that question across an ocean.

If teachers and students today can work together to close the gap between “old school” teaching methods and newer technological resources, a common ground may be found. This common ground allows for the “Type II” teaching methods, (as described in the article “Do Something Disruptive” on Mike Muir’s blog page) including podcasts, graphing calculators, and word processors, to engage young students with materials and medias they are familiar and comfortable with, while enabling teachers to encourage a deeper exploration of age old concepts. Teachers who are able to show their students that Ipods and You-Tube are for more than just music and videos will have provided their students with effective and exciting learning tools that can be used anytime, anywhere.