More on being technologically illiterate teachers (Thing 5b)

I found this post from Pat at Successful Teaching (linking to this post from Bill Ferriter) to be an interesting extension of the post from the Fisch Bowl that was one of our choices to read for an earlier "thing". I particularly loved Pat's analogy comparing computers to automobiles: both in that we need to teach students how to use them responsibly rather than just saying "the kids don't use the internet appropriately so we'll just not let them use it"

By learning how to use the tools and ways it can improve our lives, we can help the students use them responsibly too. I believe that when the automobile first came out, that society frowned on the use of them when young people used them irresponsibly. Then eventually we started to teach our young people how to drive responsibly (Driver’s Education classes came about). The automobile wasn’t going to go away and neither is technology.

and here:

When educators refuse to learn digital forums for communication and growth, it is like showing up at school today with a horse and buggy because you refuse to learn how to drive. The world is constantly changing and educators need to be able to look at the big picture and see the changes that are coming. We need to be the “go to” people for our students and not the “left behind” people.

From Bill's blog post, I was amazed to find that the Met Life Survey of the American Teacher found that:

To be specific, less than one out of every three teachers (28%) report having read or written a blog about teaching even as blogs become an increasingly common forum for conversation and resource sharing between experts in every field. Making matters worse, less than two in ten (15%) teachers have participated in online communities or social networking sites like Tapped In, Ning or Facebook.

While principal responses to the same questions were---surprisingly---higher, less than half of our leaders (42%) are reading and learning from blogs and less than one quarter (22%) are participants in online communities.

I guess that's why the 23 things course exists, to try to get teachers involved in using technology so that they can discover how useful and vital it is to our profession, as well as to see that it's not as scary and difficult as people seem to think.

Most of the students in my class function below the kindergarten level cognitively, so the way that I use web2.0 tools in my classroom differs from the "norm". My students don't research, they don't write papers or responses to literature, they really don't create much "tangible" work without significant assistance. I can't imagine if I were teaching a literature class, or a science or history class, especially at the high school level and *not* incorporating web2.0 into my teaching repertoire - to an extreme degree! There are so many resources out there and so many opportunities that allow students to collaborate with each other in ways that weren't possible when I was in school - and I truly feel like witholding those opportunities is doing the students a great disservice. Yes, students need to know how to write "traditional" papers - but even those are becoming less important. In college and beyond (in the "real world"), things are done more and more on the computer. The student who can write an amazing term paper but doesn't know how to participate in an online community (for example, ULearn or WebCT) is not going to do well in many college courses. I know that for some of the undergrad and graduate level courses that I and my colleagues teach, participation in the online portion of the course (even though it's not an online-course per se) counts as much as class participation, written papers, and tests.

Beyond college, this article from BusinessWeek points out, web2.0 is infiltrating the corporate world. I love the quote at the end of the article:

It may turn out that keeping up with the slick technology won't be the most important thing to master. Corporate folks accustomed to clear lines of authority may have to tolerate bottom-up Web 2.0 technologies in order to help their employees reap the potential productivity gains. After all, notes Dave Girouard, vice-president in charge of Google Inc.'s (GOOG ) enterprise division, which sells search and other technology to corporations: "This isn't people fooling around. It's people trying to do their jobs better."

I think that, similarly, *teachers* who are accustomed to clear lines of authority may have to tolerate bottom-up Web 2.0 technologies in order to help our *students* reap the potential productivity gains!