but i'm also a new school girl, given that i went back to school in the 21st century, when everyone had computers, and then came facebook, and then came ... well, here i am.
and i don't buy the argument that tech is making us dumber. what i do buy however, is something a little more complicated, and that's that tech doesn't replace humanity - not of teaching, not of learning, and certainly not of living in this world.
this morning, this came up in my facebook feed (and yep, i'm one of those, who checks facebook first thing in the morning. see? new school/old school). at the center of it is this idea of "app-transcendence":
"when you put the apps away and use your own wits, not someone else’s.” To help kids get to that point, [Howard] Gardner suggests that teachers and parents “ask who created the technology and for what purpose, to what extent is it flexible, to what extent are the data produced going to be used by the manufacturer and the creator? In other words, interrogate the technology, interrogate the software. The existence of it is nice, but that’s not a mandate to use it.”what follows in the article is a pretty interesting list of ways to keep the person in the technology. for those who know me already, this is not an unusual thing for me to say. "we're all people" i'm notorious for insisting in the classroom. "act like a person.'
what does it mean to act like a person? it's possible i'm a little obsessive on this point, but for good reason. there are all kinds of ways we are encouraged or supported, or pressured even, to distance ourselves from our personhood. and i am nearly sure that this is where the fear of technology making us dumb stems from. it's too easy to live our lives and never have to answer, personally, for what we've lived, or done, or said.
even as teachers.
so, yeah, there may be an app for that, for everything you can imagine wanting to do in your classroom. but without your person behind it, it's not really that useful.
And just when you thought I was done speaking my peace, I remembered that when I wrote this post I intended to share with you all one particular app
ReplyDeletehttp://www.elireview.com/
that may well allow for the person, even rely on the person(s) using the tech, to make all the difference.
i've used it in one semester of my teaching so far, and i'd like to play with it more. i can say that the experience was mixed - after all, it was my first time as well as my students' first, but there were some interesting opportunities there, and i did find some of our class time was not only freed up for other things, but other, larger, more complex discussions about revision, about writing, about collaboration, etc.
So, there.