A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate to be able to attend the inaugural Educamp Dunners 2011. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet up with some "old" friends/colleagues as well as face to face with some fellow Tweetchers. One of the highlights was the eight student teachers who attended. It was great to see so many giving up their Saturday (during their final practicums!) to come along.
This has got me thinking about the modelling of e-Learning practices that 'experienced' teachers are doing for our students.
Yoobee Dunedin held an educators' seminar on Wednesday night where Richard Newton, Principal of St Clair School in Dunedin, spoke. I was fortunate to teach at St Clair for 5 years, and as well as being converted to a Mac girl, I learnt a lot about teaching and learning in general as well as gaining a passion for e-Learning practices. Richard made a very relevant point when he said that in 1986, when he had his first computer in the class, the children were publishing their writing and playing games. In many classrooms today, despite the HUGE advances in technology, this is still the extent of the use of computers.
Kath Morris blogged about the changes in technology during her years of teaching. One of the points to come out in the discussion was that sometimes our beginning teachers are the least confident at integrating technology into their programmes. Why is this? Many (most!) of these teachers have grown up with the internet and have never had to 'learn' how to use the technology.
One of my emerging "theories" is that at this stage of a teacher's career, there isn't always have a personal teaching philosophy to embed technology into, instead computers etc are seen as an 'add on' which adds more work, more stress and more chances of something going wrong!
With experience, teachers begin to see how technolgy can fit within what they are already doing, and then how it could meet students' learning needs. Technology becomes the tool to complete the job and assist with the learning, rather than the learning in itself. And of course from here, the world is your oyster and the possibilities for using "the tools" are endless.
From a leadership perspective (in the most general sense) how can we nudge our experienced teachers further along the continuum, to move beyond integrating technology to fit within what they are already doing to doing things differently altogether, and how can we give student/beginning teachers the confidence to use what is so natural to them in the classroom?
Yup I think you are on the money with BTs and ICT. It doesn't help that that in my experience the teacher education providers are pretty archaic in their practices. I HAD to fill in one application by hand, still write exams etc. and ICT just isn't mentioned within the subject areas. I had a week all up on integrating ICT into teaching which wasn't examined. :-(
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments Stephanie. The providers lack of knowledge in this area certainly doesn't help. Like most teacher education though, the majority of learning is done while on practicum. As a beginning teacher, what would your advice be to associate teachers to help the process along?
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