This blog post is in response to a discussion that was posted in my Disruptive Innovation class. The discussion was based around the question, "Why is change important?"
Change in the classroom is vital to the development of our students. There was a discussion I had when a colleague and they said something that has stuck with me and piqued my interest in moving into the technology realm of education. We were discussing how different the world had changed in just the last 10 years with the use of technology. We discussed how we learned how to use a floppy disk in school which is now a skill that is completely obsolete. They then mentioned how different the world will be when our middle schoolers were entering the workforce and how the tools they will be using probably don’t even exist yet. How do you prepare for that? How can you make a student efficient in something that doesn’t even exist yet? The answer is, well, you can’t. But what you can do is prepare them as a learner to be equipped for changes and facilitate their own learning. This conversation was disruptive in its own way for me. It is what started me down this path of wanting to be a part of this shift and helping change the model of what we traditionally know as school to fit better with the world our students will be entering into.
I believe we have emphasized so much on the technology piece of the puzzle and not the educational piece. I know I have been guilty of using something in my classroom because it is cool and new but at the end of it, I sit and think, did this actually benefit the learning of my students? It can be frustrating when that answer is no, I feel like I have wasted my precious time. Instead, I want to focus on making the technology work for me. I want to find ways that I can use it to help enhance the learning of the students and not just a means of delivering the instruction or assignment.
Technology has been a great tool that has entered the classroom with such a force in the past year. But, at least at my campus, I’ve seen it just become a tool to deliver instruction in a world where we aren’t supposed to be touching the same items or coming within 6 feet of each other. And because this is the case, I worry about what will happen when we get back to “normal.” All of these leaps and bounds that we are making and all of this learning that is taking place may just go out the window in desperation to just get back to normal.
In my organization, we are blessed with having a chromebook for each individual student. I believe this could be a great asset to help promote blended learning. I do want to implement the station rotation strategy to receive feedback about where individual students are at and to hopefully be able to get extra one-on-one time with those students who need it. My classroom has always been a place for collaboration and group work, but COVID has made that extremely difficult in the past year. I have struggled with getting as much collaboration and grouping into my classroom as possible but it has proved to be very difficult. This is something that I plan to continue to explore to find solutions and better benefit myself as an educator and my students.
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