By pablog61
Pablo Garcia
Recently a counselor at my son’s high school tried to talk him into moving into the computer based classes instead of attending a traditional classroom. The Waterloo Community School District is pushing their students into making this switch. I think ultimately that the students, the district, and the community will suffer from these policies. It is not enough to just put computers in front of students. Schools need to move beyond thinking of technological tools as glorified encyclopedias, word processors or electronic worksheets. These methods do not engage students in meaningful learning. As technology specialists/educators, we need to use technology as tools of inquiry that will engage learners in meaningful ways.
I remember in first grade reading “Read with Dick and Jane” books that I would mindlessly skim over just enough to be able to answer the questions at the end of the unit. I would spit out countless, meaningless worksheets without making much academic progress. The school day was a drudgery that never seemed to end. My goal in the first grade was to look just busy enough to be left alone so I could dream of how many twirls I was going to try to do on the monkey bars at recess. I barely remember my first grade teacher or anything that we learned in class. The most important lessons I learned that year was: never get a boy named Rusty mad when he has a pencil in his hand and when you need a new jar of paste every week, the teacher will figure out that you are eating it.
In contrast, my second and third grade years were filled with academic growth and an excitement for learning. I had Ms. Reed for both years. She would include movies we watched at home on television, like The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, into her lesson plan. Ms. Reed would supplement the movie with books about children our age that experienced some of the same themes. She then helped us to understand the deeper meaning that was hidden in the music from that same time period. Songs that we have heard and sung many times but never really understood. Ms. Reed told us of her own experiences as a black woman before, during and after the civil rights movement of the sixties. We then discussed and worked through how it related to us. As young children, we were able to envision how hundreds of years of American history applied to us, both now and in the future. She helped our small-town; white middleclass minds open up to a whole new world of understanding. Ms. Reed enabled us to connect with the subject we were studying so that it would be relative and meaningful. We cared about what we were learning and looked forward to learning more. Recess still remained an important part of my life, but the parts in-between seemed to fly by. And by the way, I was able to get off of the paste.
Everyone is excited about interactive whiteboards. Schools are spending large portions of their budgets on them. Will all of this money thrown at technology reap the desired results? Not if these interactive white boards are used as $4,000 worksheets. Worksheets are what a lazy, unmotivated teacher turns to to keep the students busy. A student learns best by being actively involved in their learning. One way to do this is to have the students become the teachers by creating their own interactive flip-charts. A creative, talented teacher will integrate interactive flip-charts into a student centered, problem based learning curriculum.
Technology in the majority of classrooms has been used in the same manner as pencils, notebooks, and other common classroom tools without significant strides in academic performance. Using technology for these limited purposes is what my first grade teacher would have done. Academic progress will be limited unless technology is integrated into a lesson plan filled with interesting, meaningful, student centered experiences; taught by a teacher that gets what it takes to inspire children to learn.
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