We are All Technology Teachers

Critics of laptops in classrooms, slow down.

Staunch proponents technology in learning, slow down too.

While schools have pumped funds in to the use of laptops for students, research hasn’t shown that students’ learning has improved at all.  John Timmer says it well:

In general, the authors argue, the benefits of laptops come in cases where the larger educational program has been redesigned to incorporate their unique capabilities, and the teachers have been trained in order to better integrate laptop use into the wider educational experience. Both of these processes are resource-intensive, and the degree of their success may vary from classroom to classroom even in a single school, which is likely to explain the wide variability in the results.

This should not be a surprise though.  Educators have made the mistake of treating technological devices like magic wands.  Would we expect that merely putting pens in students’ hands would make them deft writers?  Of course not.  It is the teacher who must engage with students on how to use tools for learning.  This goes for pens as well as computers.  Why is it that teachers seem to approach students’ use of computers differently than other tools?  While it should be common sense, the harsh reality of laptops in classrooms is sometimes

that everything from IM chats to online shopping excursions take place over the in-class ether, distracting everyone involved: the student, his or her neighbors, and potentially the professors, who may watch their grip on the classroom slowly slipping away.

What’s slipping isn’t “grip,” it’s pedagogy.  There are two points worth making here.  First, teachers, it seems,  sometimes view any way of thinking that does not fit into their own framework of thinking as uncritical, or laziness.  And yet, a student who is doing more than taking notes in class is as likely to be Googling something that comes up in discussion as he is “spacing out” or IMing.    This leads to a second point: using technology in schools means being open to how it lets students think differently: to think that computers only offer a way to take notes electronically (something that could just as easily be done with a pencil and paper) ignores that it is a multi-modal tool which offers myriad ways to explore and express ideas.

We are all technology teachers.  That is, we are, as educators, responsible for guiding and shaping how our students think and learn with different tools.  Even if we don’t fully understand what students are doing online, we know well how to ask critical questions about it.  We don’t have to know what something is in order to ask students how they are learning through it.  We only have to ask questions.  As teachers, we should be quite good at that.  It’s vital that pedagogy doesn’t give way to technophobia.

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