Paradigm shifts are holy experiences...the world you knew, or thought you knew, ceases to exist. Today I realized, despite being a young professional still pretty fresh off the collegial setting, that I am but a "Zack Morris" cell phone in a land of iPhones. It is not like I have resisted this meteoric launch into the future. To the contrary, my first purchase as new homeowner was a brand new Visio flatscreen HDTV w/DVR capabilities and as a wrestling coach I tend our humble freewebs team site while posting a bi-weekly blog. However, today as I sat watching & absorbing the likes of Will Richardson of Seton Hall and Annette Lamb at a professional development conference pour on about "wikis" and "twitters" and "skypes" my head nearly exploded. Seriously, I felt like Barry Bonds' hat size fresh off an andro hit in the gluteus. It never occurred to me that not only were students, young students, blogging, podcasting, & creating advanced social networks but they were forging the very near future in which our society will reside.
I consider myself a "fisher of men"...my job is to "hook" 15 & 16 year old children into learning United States History, Economics, Civics, Geography, & Organizational skills. The hooks I have used for the job are somewhat equivalent to telegraphing your mother in Morse code to wish her a Happy Mother's Day...Overhead projectors, bulleted powerpoints, lecture notes, a textbook from 1995 (Bill Clinton's presidency is the unfinished chapter at the end of the book) are my tools of the trade. Boy do I feel like a blacksmith in a Honda plant. Today, my vision was realized, a very clear vision at that. First, the world around me changes whether I am or not. Second, I can no longer wonder why my students are sometimes disconnected, unengaged...shuffling papers back and forth is archaic and they know it, why don't we? And third, if I am going to exist in this new paradigm of a "wiki" world I better do like the man on the donkey...
Big Dan..."What did the man who was riding the donkey up the mountain do when his donkey died? He got off his dead ass and started walking..."
It's about time I started walking.
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I think that you are correct that there are definite advantages (and necessities) to engaging the students digitally. They live in that world, and they are more easily accessed via that medium. I have a few concerns, though...
1. Time and effort: It takes significant time and effort to both learn the skills, as well as to shift learning from the traditional medium to the digital. I don't want to sound like an unwilling educator, but there is a real limit to the time and effort I have to go around, and personally, my family will not sacrifice any more for my decisions. My father once told me that you give all that you can...but you have to stop at the point when it begins to take food from your family's table.
2. Effectiveness: A simple shift of media is not enough. To take a handout and shift it to a digital projection is not going to change its effectiveness in the classroom, and then leads back to #1: how much time and effort did you put into digitizing that handout. If the gain outweighs the cost: GREAT! If not, then your efforts might be better spent elsewhere.
3. Support: I would really like to build a digital classroom and engage the students through computers and the internet...but too many time have I hauled a class down to the lab and had to double up on computers due to technical difficulties. Heck, there are computers that have been out of service since LAST YEAR! Further, anything that is media intensive requires a high download rate, and a reliable bandwidth connection. That has just not been reliable here in FHPS. Heck, I went through last year with an overhead that was 1/3 blacked out (I didn't get it replaced until 2-months into this school year) and have had to wheel around digital projectors to use any of the digital media. We need support from above before we can effectively incorporate these changes inthe classroom.
OK...that all said, I am 100% supportive of a engaging these new technologies in the classroom. It really does improve attention and involvement from the students. It also helps prepare them for the world within which they are going to work (unless they become educators). But I would like to see some of the onus placed on the students. With the introduction of the VERY affordable laptops ($399 retail) we should be able to require that our students buy a laptop for their school days. (Students who cannot afford them can sign one out for the year from the school with a clause requiring proper usage and financial responsibility.) We could take all the printing and lab budget money and use it to buy a decent wireless network and server. Ebooks are now available for novels, calculators are built in, papers are turned in digitally, online texts are often available (no rebinding needed), and communication is instant.
If we are truly to engage the future then we really need to get off our butts and make it happen...and we need to do it 100% rather than halfway. If we want to win in this game we need to pull out all the stops, and the consequence of losing is the future of many of our students. Is that a price we are willing to pay? Thus far it seems to be acceptable...
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