The explosion of recent technologies has been incredible and it is hard to image what the next ten to twenty years will bring. I remember trying the internet and email for the first time in college and how exciting it was to use. Now, sending an email is so routine and doing a quick Google search on any topic is the first thing we think to do. How we use the technology in our classrooms, how we prepare our students to use the technologies, and ways to incorporate important workplace skills are critical to our students’ success.
I was not aware of the name Web 2.0, but I have been using some of the newer interactive sites like Facebook. I have used interactive websites on photosynthesis on a SMART board with my biology classes.
The world is getting smaller and flatter as discussed in the “It’s a Flat World After All”. Our students need the required skills to succeed in the workplace in order to compete with countries like India and China. The quote “Girls finish your homework – people in China and India are starving for your job”, by Thomas Friedman is an interesting way to state how our students need to have the skills to be competitive for jobs here in the United States with people from around the world. While staying at a small bed and breakfast during our visit to the Winter Olympics in Vancouver this February, we met a couple from Finland. During a conversation at breakfast, the couple we were traveling with discovered that the man from Finland had visited a very small town in Michigan where they had family. They even knew a few of the same people from the town. The world is truly getting smaller as we continue to travel and connect using technology.
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills and the New Challenge for Science Education articles discuss the important skills our students need for their future. Science classes are one of the areas that can introduce, teach, and reinforce these skills by using scientific investigations and inquiry based labs. Non-routine problem solving and systems thinking are two skills that are difficult for students if they are used to cookbook style labs. I have been adding new inquiry labs to my biology classes to help students become better problem solvers and thinkers. The students can be resistant to these changes when they are used to being spoon feed the information and wanting to know the one correct answer. Students need to be successful in partial inquiry labs and work up to more involved inquiry labs to help them make the change in thinking. A good inquiry lab using partners or a small group can help the students use and learn the needed skills of communication, self-management, critical thinking, creativity, collaborative skills, accountability, and self direction.
Technology in the classroom has great potential if it can be used to improve student learning in the content area in a way that a textbook or lecture would not be able to do. Giving a laptop to every student in the school doesn’t mean that the students will learn more if the teachers are not using the technology in new and innovative ways to increase the student learning. Using technology to help student do inquiry scientific investigations, collect data, or communicate with others to express their discoveries are ways that will help students build the skills they need for the future. Most students can easily use technology from their cell phones, MP3 players, and computers, and visit social networking sites, so we need to use that interest to help them learn the content in a way that will want to learn, think, and discover.
I am hoping to learn from this class ways to use technology in my classes in new and innovative ways that will help my students build the skills needed for them to succeed. I want to use the technology to enhance my student’s learning and to create interest in the content and not just to use it for the sake of using the computer or website when a lecture using a whiteboard would do the same thing.
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