Today's Teacher Trades Chalk for Technology

          Do you remember the brown hued paper containing green, and sometimes pink dashed lines? How about the oversized pencils, cranking cylinder copy machine with the visible ink reservoir sitting on the extra desk in the front of the room, or the yard stick in the corner of the room. Remember when you wished you would get a used book which wasn't that used? Well those days are no more. Gone are the days of pen and paper. Gone are the days of over-sized pencils, the smell of a freshly inked worksheet, yardsticks, or even blackboard pointers for that matter. In many school districts, "textbooks" are an artifact which students might choose to carry. Many do not.

          No longer do students look forward to weekly, actual physical, trips to the school library. Now students use the school library as a last resort when the online research yields little to no results. Although the days of hands-on teaching and learning appear to to be long gone, they are not quite as over as some may believe. Instead, those days have been refined, redeveloped, and reconstructed to include technology galore. With the introduction of computers, laptops, Smartboards, online textbooks, and sometimes, depending on the school district, iPads in the classroom, teachers are finding clever and innovative ways to engage students. Most recently, a teacher informed me that her school has ceased the practice of collecting cell phones from students, and instead they are encouraging students to use their cell phones as organizational tools, inputting assignment due dates and important links and Wikis as primary resources to follow up on, as opposed to taking notes in the classroom. They have even used cell phones in the classroom to encourage full participation from students by having them answer questions via text messaging, web based student response systems, and clickers. I have observed a number of classrooms, some formally but most in support of my learning challenged students. Sometimes I even observe as a mother who just happens to be an educator as well. As a result, the classroom scenes I've witnessed are very interesting.

          Teachers who merely assign worksheets, more often than not, encounter more behavior problems and more student failures in the classroom than those who incorporate interactive learning models. As a result, they spend more time writing referrals to lunch and morning detention. They spend more time redirecting students. They spend more time restating what they've previously stated because they noticed that someone was not listening. Ultimately, students spend less time learning. But then there are those classrooms offering students the opportunity to provide their own input and unique perspectives. There are those classrooms that are touching students where they are, using their technology to spark inquiry beyond what any worksheet can achieve.

          Students use videos, with stunning graphics, to learn. They play games with each other. They conduct research and present their findings to the class. They engage in healthy debates about perspectives. They use software in the classroom to present their assignments in enlightening and engaging ways, often sparking the interest of not only their peers, but their teachers as well. Notice, none of these activities mention what teachers do, instead, all of these activities focus on the student. That's what education is today, student focused learning. We have entered an era whereas, if teachers remain current on new educational trends, especially as those trends relate to technology, they will never lose a student's interest. Just as resumes can become outdated, so can classroom models, techniques, and teaching approaches.

          Staying abreast on technology ensures a teacher's ability to not only keep the interest of his students, but he may even, well, teach them something.

(First published in Yahoo voices, copyright of Williams and Williams Consulting Group, 2010, 2015)

Graphic courtesy of Google Images. 2015.