It’s a Tagged World Out There
Posted by: Toby Fischer in PD, education, issues, technology, tags: , columbusdestroyers, tags, testingIt is nice to be back to my blog again. After a week of making websites with 7th graders (very cool project, check out the final products). I have a few minutes free.
Life has been good over the last week. I found out my job isn’t being cut (this year), created the websites mentioned above and saw the Columbus Destroyers (Arena Football) win a game. Why did I mention the game? After the game my friends and I are sitting and listening to a band, interesting funk band at that. The table next to us are a bunch of kids (early 20’s) snapping pictures. I overhear this statement made from one of the young ladies to a young man: “what is your name? I’ll tag it.” Our kids are living in a world where they know what tags are and how to use them. How many teachers know what a tag is? How many teachers have even heard of a tag? I asked a teacher what a tag is in regards to technology and the reply was “is that the sticker with the number on the side of the computer?” A tag to a teacher is a sticker we use to identify the computer in our inventory. This comment stresses to me that we have a lot of teaching to do, not just to our students, but to our teachers.
The question being when? With it being testing season finding time is tough. Everything right now is “I can’t till after the test.” UGH
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April 15th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Marc Prensky, author of “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”writes “the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.”
What bothers me is not so much that existing teachers do not understand technology, but that teacher education programs don’t seem to emphasize it either. How many more years will new teachers be entering the workforce without a clue of how to use these tools for teaching?
Bill Gx