Blog Roll

I couldn’t help being truly shocked, as well as puzzled by one of my classmate’s Blog posts this past week. There was such frustration in the tone of the Blog post, that I had to weigh in with a comment, which can be found at the bottom of the link. Jamie Horvath wasn’t being heard either. There’s so much to be gained having teachers fluent in technology, and we’re not talking about reluctant teachers here. The Blog post was a plea for help, and the teacher’s school district just didn’t sound like they were about to budge from the “We gave you new MacBooks, what more do you want?” point of view.

But school districts have to make choices, and I know that many of them south of the border have their hands somewhat tied by a ridiculous law, some Orwellian sounding thing like “The We’re Leaving the Kids Behind and the Staff aren’t Getting any Help, just Hardware…” or some such legislation.

But seriously, here’s an initiative that would actually help the children, by helping the teachers to be better models of what a 21st century learner could look like, since students themselves aren’t really sure, other than it might look a lot like Facebook and Twitter. We can be more than that with our students, if the training we have makes us confident about technology, knowing full well that most of our students are light years ahead on the tech part, but still need the guidance of a confident teacher to make tech experiences lasting learning experiences.

Edutopia has just published a Blog post about whether teachers should be forced to receive technology training. Edutopia, the website of the George Lucas Foundation, which is subtitled What Works in Public Education, often presents challenging discussions to encourage public discourse. What do you think? Read their post and weigh in with your vote to see the results of those who have taken it. You’ll be surprised, perhaps, about what the readers of Edutopia are saying. Would tech training help teachers be better at Differentiated Instruction? There are already technology standards for teachers that are drafted by the ISTE. The School Districts need to ramp up the help they give to teachers to better help students use technology.