Rollin' Down the Digital River
What are your personal beliefs about teaching in the digital-age classroom? How do you view the role that you will play in this aspect of teaching and learning?
I sleep in scattered fits of nervous dread. While I desperately desire my goal’s lofty realization, and grow happily excited at the mere thought of its approach, at times my excitation turns, in all earnestness, to morbid dread. How can I prepare those kids for a future that doesn’t yet exist? Even if I somehow sprouted digital gills and began breathing digital waters, the fugacious flowing current might just carry me away. Perspicacious and fugacious, Heraclitus was clairvoyant.
I understand the will to Amish. Maybe that’s what draws me into history; to pastoral settings and bloody battles when the killing was always done in person. For thousands of years it was good enough, but now what’s good won’t last the day, and keeping up with it all keeps me up through the night.
But think of the comforts! Great boons to convenience! Indoor plumbing and electricity? I have a personal learning machine and a passport to the libraries of the world. I’ve been trained to navigate these libraries like a Mississippi boatman . . . but I’d be lost in the archives at Jarrow; I’d be useless at the Florentine Academy; and Bede and Mirandola both would suffocate today. How can I keep from drowning in the streams of tomorrow, before I can somehow prepare young people to swim in the oceans of next year?
The ISTE standards offer specific guidelines for remaining technologically relevant. In addition to exhibiting cutting-edge skills, standard three demands teachers “demonstrate fluency in technology systems and the transfer of current knowledge to new technologies and situations." This fluency can be achieved through:
collaboration with tech-savy peers,
utilizing the tremendous potential current technologies offer for personal development, and
maintaining an open mind.
If I can thus cling to a vestige of fluency, then I’ll be able to take advantage of the opportunities new tech affords. When I stop worrying and start practicing with new online tools, and begin to taste the potential for creative assessment, differentiation, and lessons that would have been unthinkable yesterday, my excitement at times overpowers my dread.
Have your personal beliefs evolved since you completed your first post?
I was quite the leery Luddite upon commencement of my first blog post. I understood the tantalizing draw and even the need for significantly greater technological mastery. I thought of my limited digital literacy as something that needed to be addressed, but I was suspicious of methods which might involve sinking bleary-eyed children even deeper into their mobile devices. I thought of the digital world as a metaphorical Rumpelstiltskin, some ancient Mephistophelian troll advertising digital heaven . . . all the while ensorcelling the little ones into academic hell.
I’m still a work in progress. It’s like walking into a cool lake. At first it’s freezing and it takes a real act of will to force myself to go deeper. Once I get adjusted to the temperature I realize that it’s no big deal,