Digital Natives
If you are an ICT facilitator or someone in charge of trying to initiate change in teachers’ attitudes towards catering for our students unknown future, you might be interested in reading this post from Wesley Fryer.
I’ll say that overwhelming teachers with the messages from “The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century” by Tom Friedman may not be the best way to encourage teachers to teach digital.
The ideas of the “Did You Know” presentation are VERY intimidating and even overwhelming for teachers. Some of the responses from teachers about the video, after having discussed it with their peers, have lately included:
- Boy I’m glad I’m retiring soon.
- The United States is really in bad shape.
- I’m overwhelmed.
- I may be in the wrong profession.
- My kids can’t and won’t teach themselves. How will they survive in this new world?The amazing thing to me in listening to and documenting these teacher responses has been that no one has said, “Maybe we need to teach differently in our schools.” The common responses instead have been: I’m overwhelmed, I’m so behind, there’s no way I can deal with this. I’m ready to retire.
Wes comments that showing them videos like 2020 Vision, Did You Know is probably not the right approach in getting them to teach digital. I think we have found the same reaction in some of our staff and cluster meetings. We need to take smaller steps and as I was reading Wes’s post I was thinking back to the ‘old days’ when we were using something similar to epals.com (can’t remember the name) to connect students with each other via email.
Maybe that’s where we need to start once again - simple email connections to get them involved in this digital age. I’m sure if we got something like this happening the students would drive the move towards greater digital connections via shared wikis, skype etc.
Any thoughts?
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