after reading the comments re. technology this image struck a cord.
Looking forward to meeting you all and reading your thoughtful conversations.
This is a great space to share thoughts, resources and feelings in general with your classmates. I will comment on conversations when and where necessary or helpful.
Feel free to experiment with the all the technology has to offer.
Chris
Hi Everyone,
ReplyDeleteI was wondering if anyone else has read the book "Nineteen Minutes" by Jodi Picoult.
Regardless if you've read the book or not, I would love to have a discussion about some of the topics that the book engages, regarding bullying. I am particularly interested in discussing the role that bullying plays in the classroom, and how many schools are now not responsible for enforcing discipline regarding "cyber bullying".
Here is a link to a synopsis and some excerpts if you haven't read it: http://www.jodipicoult.com/nineteen-minutes.html#eqs
Cheers,
Lindsay
In regards to the shift happens. When i walked into the majority of our classes over the last week it seems that all of them are using some sort of twitter or blog or blackboard site or something to communicate. Its amazing how the age of technology is happening before our eyes and at an alarming rate and with this, it's amazing how fast ideas can be shared. Now i am completely comfortable with using computers and all that stuff, but even i found the variety of different communication sites to be overwhelming so this is a good eye opener for me to lock in and learn to use all of these different ways of communication. Before this week i was purely an e-mailer and that was all i did in the way of on-line communication. So i think the way our classes our set-up with all this e-stuff, although overwhelming i feel that im going to be dropped into the stream and join the shift, which I think is a great thing and in the long run beneficial.
ReplyDeleteHello everyone, or rather the four others who all managed to figure there way though the technological hurdles. Firstly in response to Lindsay’s query no I have not read “nineteen minutes”, but I guess it is defiantly something that I will look into, as sadly bullying is a scenario all of us are going to encounter sooner or later, if not already. I thought the “Shift Happens” slide show was well worth the watch, and was very informative. It is crazy how fast technology is exponentially improving before our eyes. As for me I really just use computers for word processing, and checking emails. Only in the last year did I even create a Facebook account, so for me blogging and communicating with classmates via the web is totally new. I am somewhat thankful that the Ed program is using these tools, as the slide show made clear, we will only find ourselves further and further behind the longer people like myself wait. Look forward to talking to you all in class.
ReplyDeleteCullen
Hi Everyone,
ReplyDeleteI'll have to echo many of the comments made earlier. The transition in technology over the past few years has been astounding, and its effect on education, as we've all seen this week, is staggering. The extended use of powerpoint, word, websites and networking in education is difficult to imagine for those of us from the chalkboard/textbook generation. Shift Happens, if nothing else, definitely made a powerful point about how this challenges well established modes of learning and relating to others. One thing I thought of during my struggles, however, was the wide gulf between the technologically literate and those who are not, and how traditional literacy affects a person's ability to acquire technological literacy. The link below has a little more on that, as well as a couple of general notes on teaching strategies in regards to the 'digital divide':
http://www.techknowlogia.org/TKL_Articles/PDF/116.pdf
Hi
ReplyDeleteWhile I agree that the rapidity in which technology is expanding is overwhelming, what really stands out to me is that because "Shift Happens" we should be striving to teach youth to be perpetual learners rather than fact memorizers. If the predictions that "Shift Happens" presents even half come true than our students, as well as ourselves, need to be prepared to become literate in whatever technologies we are presented with. Moreover, we need to focus on providing youth with the critical tools to evaluate the validity and credibility of the massive amount of information that they encounter and will continue to encounter throughout their educational and professional careers. Judging by the few comments that have already been made and my own personal relationship with technology, our generation, despite growing up as the information age became reality, does not interact with technology at the same level that students do. Most Canadians have access to the internet and therefore have access to an astronomical amount of information that is continually increasing. And as access to this information and technology increases, I keep asking myself, what are we going to do with all this information?
After getting the Internet back I was finally able to google this "shift happens." When I was thinking about what it could possibly mean over the weekend I had little clue as to what to expect. I watched the original video, which was a little hard to read at times, but the music was so soothing! Some of the facts in the video blew me away, others did not. The first thing that came to my mind was technology has advanced so much, whatever happened to old fashion books. Being a teacher today is light years different that 20 years ago. I know the way of teaching is trying to keep up with technology, for example using power point in the classroom, but I feel there is not necessarily enough funding for every high school or elementary school classroom to have the capability. Furthermore I am not totally convinced technology really aids in classroom learning. Perhaps most of my professors of my undergrad had been "old school" but only two of my professors actually used power point. I did not feel that I learned more or less if power point, the good old overhead projector or the chalkboard had been used. I suppose my generation has been the transition generation between the "old styles of learning" and the technological changes to aid learning. I am open to learning about new technology, and if I were to be honest with myself I pretty much keep up with the new technology, and how it will help not only my teaching, but the students learning. I appreciate that this next generation that I will be teaching is immersed in technology and I think in order to reach the students you have to speak and understand their language, which includes ever moving technology.
ReplyDeleteLindsey Kellington
I have actually seen this clip in a first year Geography class I took, due to the globalization aspect of it. I think the whole idea of "Shift Happens" is present within my own family, where my grandmother can use a computer for basic things like word processing but if you give her a computer with internet capabilities she has no idea what to do. She taught at the elementary school level for many years and computers were definitely not part of her classroom in the 1960's. Then you have my mother, who is also an elementary school teacher, who as few as 5 to 6 years ago had a computer in her classroom that was mainly used for her own organization and report cards. She was teaching in a portable with chalkboards, and whatever technology/computer class was taught, was taught by another teacher in another room. When I was in high school, many of my lessons were taught using overheads or a whiteboard, but most classrooms had a computer or two, again mainly for the use of the teacher to keep track of grades and student's progress but occasionally these computers were used to google things while in class because we had questions that the textbook and sometimes the teacher, couldn't answer. There is evidence all around us that "Shift Happens" and I think we have all witnessed that, to some extent, in our lifetimes. As teachers, we need to be aware that our students also have access to these same technologies, but have possibly mastered them even more than we have, and we need to find ways of teaching that incorporate these technologies, that the students can relate to, in order to keep the students engaged and learning.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI watched the slideshow regarding “Shift Happens” last night after working all day so bits and pieces of information were hard to me to take in and understand. Hopefully, I still got something out of it. I find that the slideshow really gets you thinking about technology and its importance in education. Over the years, I’ve just become to accept the use of technology in the classroom and not think twice about it. I think our generation is so used to the evolution of technology and is not surprised by the amazing things we can now do with computers, cell phones, etc. This is much unlike the generations before us, our parents and grandparents, who are continuously amazed by the ongoing changing world that depends on technology. This is probably mainly due to the fact that our parents and grandparents have no clue how to work the damn things. Last night, BC Hydro shut off the power in our building for 6 hours from 10 pm – 4 am. It was amazing to find how utterly bored I was with no power or technology (computer/internet, tv/cable). Life as we know it does depend on the ever evolving technology and I think it is important that technology should be involved in a classroom setting. I still believe that we should be careful that technology doesn’t take over the world. Technology is important to society but should never define who we are.
ReplyDeleteConsider this:
ReplyDeleteIf I told you that all content knowledge that you teach in your subject area would become obsolete in 5 years, would that change the way you approach your class? How & why?
Chris
Shift can be overwhelming. I just came from several years working within an office in which 80% of the staff really struggled with the new technologies that we were expected to integrate on a daily basis.
ReplyDeleteAs a younger person in the office, I might not have had fluency in some of these applications either, but I wasn't scared of learning them and knew how to teach myself how to use them. That is what I think is important to know, and what is important for our students to know. There is no possible way that we can keep up with every new tech application out there. We will have to get used to the fact that our students will sometimes know more than us when it comes to the use of new technologies. So why not invite them to share? If all the content that we teach in our subject area becomes obsolete in 5 years, then our role will have to be that of facilitator more than ever. If our goal is to have our students learn about the world, then we can guide them, but not tell them about the world. Let them use technology to discover.
It's a bit difficult for me to answer the question about if the content knowledge in my areas became obsolete in 5 years, as my teaching areas are Socials and French, fairly concrete things that have developed over time. However, if it happened I supposed that instead of trying to teach the students the facts about history or how to conjugate verbs and put sentences together, I'd have to maybe show them how to obtain new information and ensure it is factual and correct, not just made up, and to encourage students to speak the language as much as possible to become functional in it, something I'm going to have to do now anyway. I tried typing Chris' question into google and found this sort of forum, which asks a slightly different question but I think some of the responses are still quite interesting. http://www.edutopia.org/poll-technology-educators-obsolete
ReplyDeleteIn regards to Shift Happens I realized how dependent our society is becoming on technology as it advances into all realms of our lives. I question whether it is too far fetched to say that with advancing technology that the teaching profession may one day become obsolete? If a supercomputer is one day going to be more advanced than the human brain, is it logical to say that one day a computer would be a better teacher? Learning through technology can have its advantages. An example being remote schools that may not have the proper resources or funding to support a certain class could have their students learn from another school via the internet. However, my concern is that this new age of communication technology is preventing students from advancing basic social skills that they would normally get from working one on one with peers and teachers within the classroom setting.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to shift happens I would like to point out that the video is trying to blow your mind by putting up pieces of information without any hard proof. Yes technology is rapidly changing and so too is the world. However, its predictions of the future seem totally ridiculous. I have seen modern day robots and they aren’t very smart. Therefore if a supercomputer that is smarter than the whole planet is going to be made it will have to have been designed and made by people. This is like back in the 1960s when people predicted everyone would have flying cars by the year 2000. I don’t have a flying car, do you? Make wild guess about the future can make it sound fantastic futuristic but there are no cold hard facts to support it.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to the Chris’s question about teaching something where the content is going to be obsolete in 5 years, I have this to say. In my teaching area, chemistry, I will be teaching the scientific laws of chemistry that are not likely to change anytime soon. Now if I was teaching a class that the material goes obsolete in 5 years I would have to either keep up with the times or find another job. However, I my information technology teacher I had in high school still teaches the same stuff he did 5 years ago in his class its just using a newer version of the same program when I was there.
In Response to Chris' question I would be teaching social studies. Due to the fact that social studies is based in history,and history is solid facts, it is highly improbable that the content knowledge would become obsolete in 5 years. However, because geography and sociology can be grouped together with social studies it is possible for information concerning geographic matters could be obsolete in 5 years. Similarly theories in sociology could change and become obsolete. In that situation, I would probably be forced to turn to technology to aid my teaching because the information would have to be current in order for the students to taught the right information. Also, in the situation I would want to change my approach because I would still want to teach. Just because the way students receive information and the way it is taught to them has changed does not mean I would want to change careers. Perhaps I would just have to change my teaching to something more practical like ethics, values or even cooking!!!!
ReplyDeleteIn response to Chris's question, in the context of Shift Happens, it means a major component of education needs to be the ability to interpret information and critically understand new ideas quickly. I agree with Lindsey on this one, as it seems like Social Studies addresses both of those concerns quite directly.
ReplyDeleteI think that Chris' reference to knowledge becoming obsolete as quickly as 5 years from now serves to reinforce that learning the process and learning how to learn and think really is more important than only learning raw facts. Many times during my undergraduate degree the teachers told us that we were learning to think, and not simply learning facts. That employers wanted people capable of thinking. I think that it is important for us as educators to realize this. The raw facts are often not retained for any length of time and this presentation (Shift Happens) is intended to show how rapidly our knowledge and technology is changing. As educators, we need to equip our students with the skills to adapt to a changing knowledge base and changing technologies.
ReplyDeleteFor me, this also reinforced the need to stay current in my teaching area (Biology). In order to properly teach Biology I need to stay up to date with the current understanding. This means being a lifelong student of Biology and making the effort to stay current.
On a related note, I think it is great that the education department appears to recognize the importance of technology and the extent to which it is now a part of our students lives. Integrating technology into our program will (hopefully) make us better educators.
Sorry, my last post was incomplete. I meant that Social Studies and History can impart many of the interpretive skills required when the economy, education system and means of communication are changing rapidly. Researching skill which are emphasized in History and Social Studies are extremely useful in being able to make use of the mountains of information available. The ability to critically evaluate maideaterial is another example of a highly useful skill which social studies engenders, and which is incredibly useful when researching through search engines and databases.
ReplyDeleteRegardless, I'm sure all of us here could make a good argument about a skill we learned which is valuable in this context.
I agree with most people about staying current. I wouldn't bail on my subject I would just stay on top of the material. I think this is something that should be done wether you going obsolete or not as a teacher. You can't just instruct students with out-dated material, what good is that?
ReplyDeleteIn response to “shift happens”:
ReplyDeleteAs future teachers we will be challenged not only with keeping up to date on our own personal skills and understandings of current technology, but also we will be faced with students who have a vast range of abilities in the field of technology. Unmistakably, technology has its advantages, however with the exponential growth of technology predicted by Karl Fisch in “shift happens”, I worry that the gaps in regards to a students abilities with technology will also grow exponentially, and if so, what can we do as future teachers to keep up?
I think this and Chris’s question can be answered simply, by stating that education is a never-ending process. Regardless of whether or not our subject content shifts or becomes obsolete, we as teachers will be constantly learning new tools, new methods and using new experiences to better ourselves as educators.
Regarding Chris's question:
ReplyDeleteBeing a being a biology major, it is likely that a significant amount of the content knowledge that I would teach now, could in fact, become obsolete in the future. Science, at least in the areas I’m most familiar with (biology/medical science), evolve so rapidly that by the time most text books are written, printed, and available in stores, there are inaccuracies, although the basics usually remain the same. With this is in mind, I would definitely change the way that I approach my class. I would focus less on teaching the current facts and theories and more on how those theories came about. I would want my students to focus on thinking systematically rather than just memorizing current theories. I completely agree with Cameron in that it is more important to teach someone how to learn, rather than just the raw fact. “Give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime.”
Erin :)
Baby's up, and so I guess I am too. Might as well read your interesting blogs while I'm at it, seeing as though there has been a flurry in the last 4 hours or so.
ReplyDeleteMy 'obsolete' question was meant to be hypothetical, however, as an aside I read a lot of 'for sure' comments about one's teachables, and how 'certain' they were of being 'concrete' and rather 'unchangeable' over time. Not saying you're right or wrong, but in my experience, the more certain you are of something being taken for granted, the more you gotta watch out as it flips around on you (think along the lines of 'the bigger they are...' - just a thought.
I guess what I was trying to get at was more process based perception of how and what we teach.
Think about it another way - in our teacher education program, if all the unit and lesson planning, methods content, and testables were taken out, what would be left to learn about? Behaviour management; assessment; psychology...? I wonder what type of teacher you would be if you knew nothing about 'what' to teach but everything about 'how' to teach...hhmmm.
That leads me into a discussion that I plan on addressing in 6 hours - teacher identity.
See you soon.
Someone bring the coffee...!
Chris
I watched 'shift happens' last night and wasn't sure what to think. Yes, we are living in this technologically advanced day and age, but is it necessarily a better day and age. As somoeone above mentioned there is a huge gap between those that know how to use this new technology and those that don't.
ReplyDeleteI have been out of university for only three years and the learning gap regarding technology is huge in my experience.
The first video on 'shift happens' mentioned the 1 computer per child idea. Having lived and worked in a 3rd world country I have seen the impacts of the 1 computer per child idea and there are numerous negative impacts that I don't think many people touch down on and it would be good to hear what people think about this.
With all this being said I will learn how to use these new technologies and embrace them as I do believe that they would be an invaluable teaching tool.
See ya,
Tara
I agree with Tara - Technology is not necessarily good or bad. It can isolate people physically, or it can bring them together intellectually. A couple of comments back, Lindsey mentioned in some of her classes at uni, the profs did not use poperpoint, but were more effective than others that did use the technology. I think that flashy colours and gimmicks are no replacement for good teachers that genuinely show their enthusiasm for the subject. Many presenters get too caught up in using animation in their presentations, and don't spend enough time working on the delivery of information.
ReplyDeleteRegarding how the information we teach could hypothetically become obsolete in a couple of years, I think this highlights the role that teachers have in moulding students into independent, free-thinking, life-long learners. In my classes, I want to try to give my students the tools to find the answers to their questions, rather than have them blindly accept information I give them, memorize it, and regurgitate it on an exam.
This is the perfect example of why we should focus more on teaching classical ways of thinking versus technological. Certain things will always be of use to us where in other avenues things can quckly be obsolete. Knowing how to think and deduce will always aid in any situation. Western culture is founded on the principle of constant reinvention. Our job is to develope young minds to come up with fresh ideas and to accept responsibility for them.
ReplyDeleteI think "technological" ways of thinking will soon be "classical" ways of thinking. If we as teachers/educators/whatevers don't take time to learn the ways of change we will become as obsolete as a Vic-20. I don't think that becoming tech savvy detracts from the "humanistic" qualities of a teacher. I am a big proponent of "nothing interacts better with a person than another person". And that we cannot simply focus on technology. I also think that we have to start thinking about what will be after technology. Today's technology seems to be limited to electronics and computer based instruments. What comes after these? I am sure in our lifetime we will be exposed to at least the next "technology" and if we can't implement the tools now how are we to know how to use or even comprehend what will come next.
ReplyDeleteAs Harry S. Truman says "Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past". History is always relevant and having a good base of historical knowledge can only benefit humanity both in the present and perhaps even in the future. Having a base knowledge of the past can help society steer itself in a direction whereby it won't make the same mistakes twice. Although this is often not the case, it is certainly playing a major role in todays economic practices. Brief sorry.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Shift Happens:
ReplyDeleteIts amazing how fast technologies evolve, I don’t know how I’m going to keep up. This clip made me think of how easy and accessible information to us now and how much more it would be (and to more people) in just a few years. It seems that there will be very emphasis on knowing facts, since facts will be at students’ fingertips. It will be more valuable to teach students how to think critically. Since there would be so much information and data available to them, they should know how to determine which ones to believe and which ones to discard. We also need to think of how we can teach values of honesty when plagiarism will become rampant.
The clip also touched on the fact that people from all over the globe would be so much more connected through technology. How will this affect the way we communicate and associate with other in person? How will issues present in physicals schools now translate into the virtual world – cyber bullying, etc.?