Reflection 3: Edutopia Articles

Marc Presnky's article Adopt and Adapt resonated with me in several areas. As Alison noted, teachers are often the ones most resistant to change. We certainly don't like feeling stupid or ignorant, and so we avoid that which will make us feel so. Here in Jefferson County, the TIP program gives science and math teachers - and has now been opened to everyone - laptops and multimedia projectors to use in their classrooms. Despite this, there are multiple teachers whose laptops sat in the corner of their room or on their desks as they utilized their old overhead projectors. They were so used to these old tools that they didn't want to switch gears. As teachers, especially with so many of us being "digital immigrants" and not "digital natives" (or being somewhere awkwardly in-between), we must make a concerted effort to learn how to use these new resources. At times we'll likely get frustrated and want to give up, but if we don't accept that behavior in our students, how can we justify doing it ourselves? (And I am not even going to get into JCPS's own avoidance of new technology in their aggressive filtering...though apparently they've given in on the issue of blogger.com. Now if only I could check my gmail.)

Josh McHugh brings up a lot of good points in Synching up with I-Kid. As Alison noted, the younger generation is increasingly adapted to our new digital environment (re: Prensky's "digital natives"), and that our teaching must evolve along with these students. What I thought was particularly interesting, though, was an issue that came up in Prensky's article as well.

Prensky: It appears that students who write on a computer turn in longer and higher-quality assignments than those who compose by hand, even though it's still writing.

McHugh: Using the [DyKnow Vision] software [to analyze literature passages], the students' responses "were deeper than with pen and ink," Hamstra says. "The focus was really sharp. There's something about changing over to an electronic medium, something about that screen. It's psychological. It's a generational thing."

There is something about using digital media to write and analyze that ramps up student engagement and understanding. While reading Prensky, I just assumed that better papers came off of computers because it was easier to revise, but the success of literature analysis with DyKnow Vision seems to indicate that it's something more than that. What it is I don't know (it can't just be that they are digital natives, can it?), but it's certainly something that we need to take into account if we truly want our students to succeed.