I agree with Greg Whitby’s observation that focusing on technology is a waste of time, if you don’t have good quality teachers behind the technology to actually make it work and be useful in the learning process.
Too much today we focus on technology as the answer to everything and all our problems, when in fact it’s often not the answer but only part of the solution. Good technology will only help in students learning if students are guided through the learning process by good teachers. Technology can often hinder students in their learning as they may become more easily distracted, access incorrect or invalid information and expose themselves to risky social situations for which they’re not prepared.
An example of the above is the Federal Governments 1-to-1 laptop program that was implemented several years ago. Whilst the idea of giving students across the country access to technology sounds great, the actual implementation varied greatly, with many teachers ill-prepared to handle this new technology in the classroom and many schools without adequate infrastructure to cope with the influx of devices. Suddenly almost overnight you had teachers going from using textbooks, pen and paper to online learning environments, collaborative learning and digital media. For some teachers this was too much to handle, they simple shutdown and refused to adapt, whilst other teachers embraced the change, updating their resources, changing assessment tasks and adapting their teaching style.
As Punya Mishra said in his keynote, “Re-purposing a technology makes it an education technology”. Simply placing technology in the classroom doesn’t suddenly make it useful for education or mean it will be used for this purpose. I’ve seen many students using their 1-to-1 laptops for playing games and watching movies in class, when they should have been learning.
Again, Punya said “Creativity is the only solution, simple solutions no longer work” and I agree, simply asking students to do the same old assessment tasks using the new technology is not engaging for the students and is wasting the opportunity presented by the new technology. By asking students to come up with new ways of presenting the information you want, using the technology and skills they have, will lead to a better learning experience and outcomes for both teacher and student. The student will be more engaged in the learning process and the teacher may well be challenged to learn a new skill as well, plus the assessment will be more exciting to mark as each student will likely have presented the information in different ways or styles.
As Punya said “The more technology changes, the more things stay the same”. Simply adding technology to existing ways we teach and learn is not truly making the most of the technology and opportunity we’re presented with. Instead we should adapt and change our teaching and learning, to incorporate the technology, adapting it for our educational needs and finding the best way we can us it to help further our students learning and help equip them for their lives ahead in 21st century society.
I agree with you. Too many times it seems the emphasis is on the technology and not on the teaching. People seem to think that education standards will be suddenly increase if students have access to ipads/laptops. But as you say, its how it all used that is important.