Module Four Reflection

Ed. Tech as a Change Agent?

Aside from learning about my own stamina and patience when writing this week, I realized how collaborating with peers caused change in their thinking. 

As our district moved from the third into the fourth marking period and with no grades due until the end of the school year,  a couple of our senior English teachers were open to reviewing the draft to my paper.  I always feel bad asking my peers to review papers for me mainly because at my district we are all considerably strapped for time, and I don't want to take away those few precious moments we have during the day to refuel.  I know, as well as anybody else, that writing isn't my strongest point, but I really have been working very hard to get back into the swing of things in that area of academics. 

One of our senior teachers is particularly good at writing, in fact he has lead our eleventh graders to outperform even the most affluent school districts in the PSSA (Pennsylvania System of School Assessment). I am also his daughter's teacher.   After reviewing my paper, he not only said my paper wasn't bad, (this is good, really good), we had a conversation about how his mind has been changed as a result of what I've been doing with technology at our district.  He was moved by some of the things I said in my paper about humanism and technology. He was also grateful that I had  written about a topic that he thinks about when the words "technology in education" are mentioned.  It's really important to me that the person, the human being, does not get lost when implementing technology.  We sometimes forget that even though many of use have the title: "teacher" that it simply means someone who delivers information to students.  "Teacher" means so much more than that, and we should never forget the impact that we can have on students by our relationships with them.  Students should not sit in front of a computer without social interaction with peers and teachers; I believe that is fundamentally wrong.  Educating a child is not just the transfer of knowledge it's teaching them right from wrong, social skills, how to get along, how to disagree respectfully, how to respect themselves and those around them, and a thousand other things too numerous to describe.  Technology should be used as a tool to facilitate learning, and should be used with much thought and research.  The students should control the technology, not the technology controlling the student.

Very often though, I feel as if many of our older staff members are resistant to using technology simply because they don't understand how learning can be affected by its use.  They don't see the positive impact it can have, not only in learning, but on motivation and engagement to name a few.  They also don't see the value in how technology can literally make their lives easier; instead, they continue to do things the same way as was done when they first started teaching.  If they used technology to make the everyday tasks simpler, it would leave them time to do the important things, like create meaningful lessons utilizing technology.