Watch this clip from Sesame Street where young students from 1980s describe a computer and what can be done with one.
I love their answers:
a computer is something you write on
[with a computer you can] make designs
you can make pictures with it and it helps you read
it’s not human
[a computer doesn’t have] feelings
It can think but you have to tell it what to do, we are [doing the thinking]
By now, the kids in the video are about forty years old. They are my age. We grew up working with a computer. The focus was on what we could do with a computer. What could we write, design or create with a computer.
I wonder if today’s students have the same focus? Are we shifting from a ‘what we can do with a computer’ toward ‘what can a computer do for us’ mindset?
Last week we interviewed Illah Reza Nourbakhsh, Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. We talked a lot about how robots will affect the future. However, there was a segment of the interview that really touched on the role of the teacher and technology in the classroom.
Nourbakhsh explains the new challenges teachers face when students are working with technology in the classroom:
…educators not only need to give students the power to invent, because they need to be creators, but they need to teach them what it means to think about the process of invention, to think about the ethics of society and that’s not a lesson that we’ve ever been busy teaching people in say middle school or high school before.
When asked about teachers who feel they don’t know enough about technology, he explains:
…teachers are decades older than their students, or at least a decade older, they know about society, they know about ethics, they know about rhetoric. And we can create resources that make it ever easier for them to teach with that. But basically we’re giving people much more powerful weapons of speech. And if we do that, we have to also teach them how to use that speech. If we decouple those in the wrong way, it’s a disaster. Then we have this zoo and our quality of life goes to heck.
You can find the entire show at LabOutLoud.com, but I clipped out the segment that speaks to technology integration and share it below.
P.S. In this clip, co-host Brian Bartel coins the phrase “edtech smog” to describe the instances where technology pollutes our mission as educators. I’m putting Voki and Animoto at the top of my list as #EdtechSmog.
The post includes a video touting new 3D technology that will change your classroom forever. The video claims that 3D technology is the interactive tool that will improve behavior, increase attention, raise test scores, gets students working together, and create their love for learning.
What did I see? Dark classrooms full of students watching a teacher lecture.
They could be sleeping behind those dark glasses.
The video references student engagement seven times but if recall and remembering are your evidence for engagement, why even bother integrating new technology? We can do that with any old chalkboard, worksheet, or textbook.
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