This was posted as part of my master’s degree class in Educational Technology Curriculum at Pittsburg State, as a response to the video “A Vision Of K-12 Students Today“.
—–
The one slide “engage me” always captures my attention in this often-seen video, and the issue of engagement has probably always been a challenge in schools. Back in the early 1980s in my junior high days, most classes weren’t all that difficult for me, and I certainly fell into Marc Prensky’s category of “students who go through the motions.” Interestingly, one of my most engaging things I got to do was work by myself for a nine week period learning BASIC to program a TRS-80 Model III, complete with I believe 4K of memory, no hard drive, and cassette tape storage of programs. My TV remote probably has more computing horsepower than that!
But it was a remarkable nine weeks. The nature of the program was such that I didn’t have a teacher always there to bail me out, meaning when I got stuck on something in the curriculum I had to wrestle and struggle with it on my own. When I was able to develop a little program that calculated batting averages and used variables to “customize” what was returned on the screen, my sense of achievement was beyond description. I was very engaged because it was of high interest to me and I was able to work at my own pace.
When I watch the video, that is what I see – students who want to be interested in something. Now I’ve taught long enough to know that not all students will be as into my passions as I am, but how we deliver the content has great impact on whether the engagement meter goes up or down. With our digitally immersed students, it should not be surprising that bringing the use of a technology into a lesson pushes their interest up, at least for awhile. However, as we do adopt, adapt, and use more technologies, I imagine there will be a time when technology alone will not drive up the interest level. What will it take then? The power of connections that a good teacher makes every day. I know we’ve all read articles and such where it is clear a fear exists among some teachers that technology will replace them. Personally, I think the opposite is true. Good teachers will become MORE important. How we work and communicate with our students may well change, even dramatically, but the teacher will still be of high importance in quality learning experiences.
