A former student pointed me to an article from Education Week: Outside Interests:
“Now, nearly all schools have Internet access, and students comb the world via cyberspace with simple search commands. But experts say it is the rare classroom that turns blogs, MP3 players, podcasting, video games, or cellphones into learning tools.By falling behind the technology curve, they argue, schools risk alienating students and miss prime opportunities to teach them how to analyze and understand their increasingly complex world.
“Education is bifurcating into school and after-school,” says Marc Prensky, a New York City-based educator and consultant who coined the term “digital native” to capture the technological fluency of today’s young people. “School represents the past. After-school is where they are training themselves for the future. The danger is that as school becomes less and less relevant, it becomes more and more of a prison.”
We’ve heard it all before. The kids are well ahead of the teachers in terms of technology savoir faire. That’s been true since some time in the 80s, I think, at least in affluent areas, and the gap is widening. School culture is dominated by teachers in their 40s and older who were born too soon to have the same level of comfort with computers.
I’m hopeful, though. The student teachers I see this year all came to the table with email addresses, digital cameras and a trail of Powerpoint slides behind them, all of which wasn’t true just three or four years ago. The technologies they’re already using aren’t worlds apart from those their student use, and by the end of our course they’ve had experience making digital movies and creating instructional web pages. A good place to begin their careers.
They’ll need more tech support on the job, though, and in California at least that hasn’t been as well funded as it should be. Without that, they’ll be giant steps behind the kids they teach in just a few years.
My adopted state is near the bottom on indicators like “number of students per internet-connected computer”. We’re down there with Utah and Mississippi. At least the weather’s nice.