Digital Blog Post #A - Chapter 1

Technology. This single word can literally cause our bodies to have physical reactions. For some, the word causes excitement and feelings of anticipation as they consider an anxiously awaited text message or remember a personal success while playing an online game. For others, the word brings about a sinking feeling or a kind of dread as they relive past embarrassments or concern themselves with the possibility of future ones.
In this modern age, children are practically born with a cell phone in their hands. As you can imagine, the opinions we have about this phenomenon vary greatly.
There is, however, no denying the fact that technology will not slow down and wait for its critics to accept it. It will not pause while we try to catch our breath. Technology, like everything else that is a part of the human race, changes, grows and evolves.
Teachers in the 21st century are in a unique position to evolve with technology, or to fall to the wayside.
The simple truth is that chalkboards have gone the way of the dinosaurs...

                                              Photo Credit to Matthew Weathers on Youtube

According to the textbook Transforming Learning with New Technologies, teachers of today have the ability to create what is called a digital identity. While our current familiar identity is comprised of elements such as our age, physical appearance, and gender, a digital identity is made up of our technologically related skills and abilities (or lack thereof), and may not even include the above aforementioned things.
A teacher's classroom can include powerful learning tools such as a PowerPoint presentation,  YouTube, Evernote, and Dropbox. This ever-growing sea of options allows teachers to select technology that best suits their skill level as well as benefits the students.
A teacher can select any one, or even dozens of technological aids for their lessons. Students are visually stimulated by the streaming videos shown in classrooms, seemingly unaware of the fact that they are learning. Teachers have to ability to create personalized websites that can include anything from the current week's spelling list to the amazing opportunity of a real-time conference with a parent on a busy schedule. A teacher's digital identity is just as personal as his or her non-digital identity. It can be improved upon. It can be shared. It can be one of interaction and creativity.

Long gone are the days of waiting for parents to drive us to the library so that we can toil through card catalogs to find books on assigned essay subjects. Today's digital child is practicing vocabulary and spelling on SpellingCity.com. They are checking homework due dates as well as chatting with teachers and classmates on Edmodo.com. They are immersed in a world of notebooks without paper pages, phones without cords or peak-hour charges, and tablets that are neither stone or wooden. A digital child may not ever drop a dime into a payphone in their lifetime, but they are skilled with hand-eye coordination like no generation we have seen before them and a whimsical view on math or science brought on by games like we have not seen since we were in kindergarten. Our digital children are the ones programming contacts and ringtones into our new phones for us. They are downloading programs that some of us cannot pronounce. As the children continue to thrive from birth in this wireless world,  we must make an effort to keep one step ahead of them just so that we can stay on par. At times, the idea of this is frustrating. I don't think that there is a parent in the known world who cheerfully brings their new ipad to their middle school child's room to ask for help setting it up. This act is, instead, done with shame. We are ashamed that our children have a wealth of knowledge that we do not have. Some of us chose not to take that walk of shame... It seems, for some of us, a better idea to fight and argue and verbally slander the machine aloud, well into the wee hours of the night, before putting ourselves in the role of the child and allowing our child into the role of the caretaker. But along with the digital child is a valuable lesson for the ranting, profane ipad owning adult; we have taught our children that the only stupid question is the one left unasked, and now it is our turn to take our own medicine.

And while the infernal machine that we spent "way too much money on" has us acting no better than a chimpanzee figuring out how to work a combination lock, there comes a point when we must admit that we are outmatched, outwitted, and outgunned. The benefits of technology in the classroom far outweigh the shame from our own shortcomings. Our children are capable of designing glorious architectural masterpieces without ever wasting a scrap of paper or a speck of led. Lectures can be recorded and then absorbed and reabsorbed by an eager young mind at a time of convenience and in a place of their choosing. Cultural understanding, quotes from philosophers long since dead, lists of foreign government policies, charts of the very stars that we all live under are just a few key strokes away. The benefits of technology used for education is unlike anything we have ever seen. It is grand. Its possibilities are endless. It is the unknown. I believe that this is truly where our anxiety springs from. Our children are learning in ways that we were not allowed to. Perhaps, if we are honest, we are a little bit jealous of that fact as well.

Photo Credit to Scott McLeod on Flickr

In the end, I want to say that becoming a 21st century teacher may seem like a lot to digest for those of us who were not born as digital children, those of us who remember clapping erasers at the end of the school day, those of us whose identity was printed on a drivers license and not in cyberspace. If we can use these tools to sharpen the minds of our youth while keeping our own minds free from atrophy, then technology begins to be our friend. And it may never be as close of a friend to us as it is to our children. We simply have not known this friend for as long, or have a grip on all the wonderful things that this friend is capable of doing for our lives. We do, however have the opportunity to explore this friendship and to be the teachers who remember both the "good old days" and the "great new age". That is a remarkable opportunity set before us.