Technology is going to change the very foundations of the way we educate our future.
As a veteran teacher, I can say that I have been reluctant to change the way I am teaching. Each year, we are given something new to learn, and each year I would find the flaws. Most of the time, they were small and insignificant.
With each new change of the curriculum, I found myself saying…
“Oh, this program isn’t going to meet the needs of my special education students.”
“These books are never going to engage my students.”
“This math curriculum is ridiculous, how am I supposed to teach ALL of this.”
“This lesson is going to be boring.”
“What is wrong with the way I learned…I learned how to add, subtract, spell and write just fine without all these NEW crazy ideas.”
The truth in the matter is that times are changing and as an educator I need to change. I need to change so that my students are learning for tomorrow not yesterday. All of those excuses were my way of fighting the system and refusing to make the changes that were needed.
This year, I was offered the best chance to make the changes I needed to make me a more effective educator and the changes to make my students educated for tomorrow not yesterday. I was given the opportunity to be the technology teacher in my K-5 school. I was very nervous about making this HUGE change in my career. I had been a special education teacher for the past 15 years, and well change is not the first thing on my long list of things to do in my life. Change is scary. Change is hard. Change is just not fun. BUT I love technology. I loved using it with my special education teachers. I used it at home for everything. So this change…well I was excited and nervous all at the same time. How hard could it be, the student already knew all about technology.
Don’t they all have cell phone by the time they get to 3rd grade anyway?
I couldn’t have been more wrong in my thoughts. Yes the students did know about technology, but most of them had never used a computer to write a story. They didn’t even know some of the basic terms for computer parts in September. The students knew all about games like Subway Surfer, they knew all about YouTube. They even knew about searching on Google. But I wasn’t asked to teach them how to play games. I was asked to teach them how to take their writing in class and publish it on the computer using Word and PowerPoint. I was asked to teach them how to create a graph and to make calculations to solve word problems using Excel. So I started a year of learning on my own and making the changes that I needed to make. Now I truly believe that technology is going to change the way we educate our future. Technology is the future.
The Tech Teachers 