I remember the old days when I tried to memorize the phone book to impress my parents. Those were the days when landlines were still around, and they were actually very popular. Now, I know only my phone number by heart as all I need is saved on my phone. It is no news that technology has been improving at a rapid rate for the last 20 years. It is changing our lives drastically. The way people eat, fall in love/out of love, get information, read, study, buy tickets, book holidays, decide on which restaurant to go, live their lives and many other things have changed and are still changing.
According to Social Media Revolution 2011, fifty percent of the mobile internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook. If you are not on Facebook, it is almost like you don’t exist. We use social media for a lot of things. We write about what is going on with our lives, share our adventures, form groups, organize events, invite people to events, share recipes, complain about bad customer service, look people up on Facebook when we meet them offline, etc. It is one click away, and it is so easy as you can log in on your laptop, tablet, smartphone, and even smart TV. Social media is real. It is happening. There is no escape. Our students will be highly likely into social media like everyone else, which means they will spend a lot of time on it. The question is how we can incorporate it into our classrooms.
Educational Change Challenge is quite thought-provoking. What struck me most while watching it was “If you put a doctor of 100 years ago in today's operating room, she would be lost, yet if you placed a teacher of 100 years ago into one of today's classrooms she wouldn't skip a beat". When you enter any classroom in Turkey these days, you will see students looking at their smart phones. When you write on the board, instead of taking notes, they take a picture of the board. Many classrooms today do not reflect the real world students live in outside of school.
Students’ learning environment should be relevant to their life outside of school. Technology is in the center of our lives. Why not make the best use of it in education? It will enable students to get information faster, create learning communities, and probably make things easier to for them understand and practice. But first, educators must be well trained on how to make this happen. Most teachers today are not digital native, and using technology for education is not a compulsory component in higher education. If we are not up-to-date on technology, we will lose relevance, which can make us lose connection, and make our students lose interest.
While I was teaching English two years ago, I did not spend too much time thinking about how I could use technology in my classrooms. We had to cover a lot in our classes, and the classroom time was barely enough to catch up with the schedule. We also assigned a lot of homework to students on a daily basis. I am questioning these all now. Teachers definitely need school administration's cooperation on using technology in classes. It is not realistic to think otherwise.
Hi Gulistan! I agree with you; the classroom isn't always the best representation of what is happening in the real world. Back when I was an undergraduate student, I actually had a teacher scold a student for taking a picture of the whiteboard! I couldn't believe it. There was so much information and not a lot of time to write everything down. That same teacher also purposely did not upload her powerpoint presentations to UBLearns. I believe that it prevented the students from having access to information as fast as possible, which is never a good thing.
ReplyDeleteHi Gulistan!
ReplyDeleteSo I really enjoyed reading your post this week. I loved your question about how we should incorporate social media in our classrooms. Talk about capturing the interest of the students! When I was in school, it was a very "anti-tech" movement. No cellphones were allowed and if they were seen they were taken away. Now, I too have seen students taking pictures of notes, using their phones as a resource to look up information, etc. Technology and its use in classrooms is changing so fast. My brother graduated from high school just two years after me. I needed something off of my flash drive recently and he couldn't believe I still used one-- he said everyone in "his generation" used Google Docs! My brother is very tech savvy, and he said something like this to me, "Don't feel bad- it's not just you. That change literally happened in the year between you and me at school." That just goes to show how fast technology is evolving around us. Now, it's time for me to catch up!
What Danielle is describing "digital natives", a term we will be discussing more later in the semester. I also have an article from a researcher in Turkey about the use of mobile phones in classrooms there that I think you might be interested in that I will get to you.
ReplyDeleteHi Kate, I was just reading "14 smart ways to use smartphones in the classroom" when I saw your comment. I would love to read that article! Thank you
DeleteAs someone who is struggling now with modern technology in the classroom, or just technology period, I have to say I agree with you that we should make the best of it in education. I wish I had been exposed to it earlier in life so that I wouldn't find myself struggling to keep up with everyone else today in my class.
Delete