OK, I’ve been reading through additional comments on my demand that we stop using the “T” word. ..and it occurred to me,
Why don’t we just tell all the teacher to find another job.
Now I do not mean to quit teaching and go take another job. Instead, we ask teachers to go to the want-ads or what ever, and to try to find a job that they would like to do, other than teaching, that they would be qualified for. If they are not qualified for the job, then they should itemize the qualifications they would need, to get the job, and then plan out how they might gain those qualifications — without going back to school.
In other words,
How do we learn to teach ourselves in the new information environment.
Once they figure this out, then they may figure out how to integrate technology into the classroom, by integrating contemporary literacy into the classroom.
Do you think teachers know about Craigslist? Who needs paper classifieds?!?
Do you suppose it’s really the word “integrate” that is the most problematic for us?
I’ve thought about that, and to a degree, I think that integrate is not the best way to look at it. I guess that what I’m asking of teachers and and schools, is that they adapt what and how we teach our children to a rapidly changing world, and a dramatically different information environment. It is probably beyond integrating something new into the old, but more like reshaping the old into something new.
— dave —
i like reshaping. restructuring, maybe. perhaps even re-imagining.
these terms begin to put some onus on district leaders, principals, administrators, technology society directors, etc.
a nice shift from putting it all on teachers who make do with broken equipment, badly designed software purchased at exhorbitant prices and unreliable, if not absent, support.
ill keep repeating–teachers don’t resist technology, just lousy, inefficient and uncreative implementations of it.
I think two of these posts have become intertwined with each other, but that is fine with me, because I also saw the meshing of the two. There are some profound shifts that must take place for ‘true’ … “contemporary literacy” to take place. The idea of having teachers look at alternative careers and find ways for them to acquire the necessary skills to get a job in that field is not new to many of us in the leading wave of teaching “contemporary literacy.” I think that many of us have done enough training to work in the Information Technology field, repairing computers, configuring networks, testing and debugging software, setting up for presentations, etc. Most of us acquired those skills by taking the initiative and finding the information we needed to perform those tasks. Case in point…. I have a A+ (Computer Technician’s License) certification and a CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) certification. I was trained to be a Social Science teacher…. I currently have a greater level of ‘certifications’ than any of the technology support staff in our district. Why? because those were the skills I needed to move the process forward…