Recently I had the opportunity to attend the Georgia School Board Association’s summer meeting in Savannah, Georgia. One of our sessions was on how the education community needs to be doing a better job ingraining technology into the lives of our students. The speaker was David Warlick and it is his contention that if we do nor redefine what literacy mean in ours schools we are going to see education be passed by the technology wave that is upon us.
He made the point that as educators we for the first time in history are preparing students for an unknown future. At the rate that technology is advancing it is very difficult to plan and prepare how to adequately instruct a student over a 13 year span in K-12th grade. The student will most certainly see numerous changes in how we access, retain, and process information. Mr. Warlick indicated that consequently as a result of the pace of change we need to be teaching students how to more efficiently and effectively teach themselves.
He gave numerous examples on techniques and strategies that could be employed to give students the ability to become technology “detectives” and ensure that the resources that they are using are credible. Because of the TV/Gamer paradigm that kids are growing up into today they can process change in information much faster than their adult counterparts.
Mr Warlick stated that “We see technology and kids see streams of information”.
As educators we need to make sure that we do not do technology for technologies sake. This conversion that is taking place in our classrooms needs to meet the students where they are and have a real, tangible impact on their learning experience. In the public education sector we are never going to be able to keep pace with the expense and speed of technology changes but we can equip our students so that they have the skills to compete when they have access to all of these information resources in the future.
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Filed under: Bartow County, Education, Leadership, Politics
