Technology not just a type of dance-logy

As one of my last musings for this course, I have happened back upon this topic that we seem to have as our innovation goddess. I can think of many times through the years that some new technology was promised to be the next greatest thing in advancing the field of education and learning. In and around 1984, the Apple IIe came out and I spent hours in class learning how to make a turtle move around the screen. Floppy discs became 3.5 floppies and pong became the Atari game Pitfall. And yet…. this time spent manipulating that damned tiny turtle did not give me a more efficient path through learning how to hand write, learning how to spell, or learning how to do math facts. As time went on more and more technologies came into my life as a student and then as a teacher. University was the heady days of email and networked computer rooms. Students would gather in these rooms to work on all sorts of assignments. Personal computers got cheaper and cheaper as time progressed as well, the computer rooms gave way to home computing. Email became more user friendly and pretty to work within. As I started my career as a teacher we had so many different choices of marks programs, editing software, and presentation types. Moodles, Wikis, Smart Classroom, Bright links, to name some of the many options. Now we blog and tweet and like and share. We teach the kids to do these things too and they love to spend their time on these things. However… has it made teaching easier? I would have to say no. In fact, these innovations have made the job of the classroom harder. Attention spans have gone away. Student’s English writing skills are worse than ever, slang, acronyms, and jargon have replaced good formal writing. When I think of technology now in my classroom I do not see it as a key to the success of my teaching. It plays a very small role, if we spend much time with tech. it is because I have to discipline for overuse of smart devices. Do I think tech should be banned from classrooms? No, it will not ever be banned from our daily lives so we need to learn to cope with it. It has its uses, once a week I find it handy to have students on devices to further learning but… could I do the same learning without it? Has it made learning more efficient and easier for students? My answer to that is no. So, so called “smart” technology to me has not been a great innovation in education. And in fact that phrase could be seen as ironic.