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Jeffrey L. Jones, editor
jjones@fayette.k12.ky.us
|
Addressing this question is the same as addressing the difficult and
broader question "What should we teach?" which, of course,
implies the even cloudier question, "Why do we teach?" If
you ask the forces behind Washington's No Child Left Behind,
Kentucky's Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (CATS), and
Fayette County's Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI) and STAR Math,
there's an implied short answer: "Because your success as a
school or teacher will be measured by the success of your students
on our tests." The "why" is answered, and the
"what" just becomes the contents of the tests. As
professional educators, many of us find such an approach a bit
unsatisfying, since we define our role as teachers a little more
broadly than simply delivering someone else's content.
We'd like to think that, regardless of how routine our days may sometimes appear, our roles are a bit more noble. Our main "why" and "what" have to do with helping students achieve their own goals, and the goals implied by membership in a complex society - in short, we want to help kids, and we want to improve our world. It's important to remember this since, as one might guess, there's a lot of things important to us and our charges which don't distill down to multiple-choice questions on standards-based tests. One of those things is, of course, technology. The use of technology in most professional workplaces - from the auto repair garage to the stock broker, from the receptionist to the television news anchor, and everything in between - is well documented and a given. Although our responsibility towards the traditional curricular content has not changed, the presence and importance of technology has added another agenda we can't ignore. Most assuredly, the testing moguls will catch up with this, and it will appear as a part of large assessment mechanisms. But if we care about preparing students, and enhancing their experiences, we shouldn't wait until we're forced!
Connecting people is one of the things technology does best. From the PA system to the website, from the telephone to the international LISTSERV, technology does a fabulous job of connecting students to information, media, each other, and educational resources and instructional helps.. Just as importantly, such technology can instantly connect teachers and schools to each other, to instructional resources (including lesson plans and ideas)...even to the very standards over which their students will be assessed! What should we teach? Not only must technology be a part of the answer to that question, it will provide a medium and a forum through which we can answer it. Why should we teach technology? Because it will, without a doubt, help our students achieve their goals. Whether it will match our other lofty aim - improving our world - is, like any such pursuit, up to us...but the potential, just like that in our students themselves, is there. --Jeffrey L. Jones, Editor |
But
as many who have followed my musings (both of them - my mother and
my wife!) know, there are things technology can do that feed and
encourage all the other things we must and/or should teach. In this
month's TIPS is one such
resource - video conferencing technology. This capability isn't new
- we featured a