The first blogpost I would like to respond to is The Innovative Teachers "When tech teaches, what do teachers do?" I find this fascinating, and it very much reminds of a very complicated dilemma that halachik Jewry is dealing with nowadays as well; If all the books are available to everyone, what is the job of rabbis nowadays? And I think the answers to both questions are very similar.
To answer these a lead up question needs to be asked first, what do humans bring to the tables that books or electronic devices do not? And the answer to this is so simple, it's the same reason technology will never take over the world and humans will never fall in love with robots - technology can not show love. Technology brings all the existing information to anyone who requests it, but is thast really the goal of education? If the only goal of education was the acquisition of information then yes, all teachers can be let go. This is where i would like to bring in Cool Cat Teacher's blogpost "How we can stop teaching to the test and start empowering learning (for a change)" The point here again is that the point of education is not just information gathering and test taking, when our chuldren will go out to the real world, their ability to testtake will not help them anywhere. Again, the idea is to "empower learning" to teach the next generation the powers of knowledge and creativity. There are messages and techniques that can not be passed over through a text written in a book or on a computer. Do we really want our children to learn manners and communication skills from machines? The job of a teacher is not to give over technical information (for the most part) but rather to empower the next generation to make a difference, to be interested and connected to the world outside the classroom walls, to want to make the world the best posible place.
I think this is a very owerful message!
P.S. this does not in anyway mean that technology should not be used (in fact, I wrote about thsi in my previous post) the tools we are learning here are fabulous and cna make a huge difference in the classroom environment. Today was a bit of a reminder to not forget the real reasons I am going into education.
Yishai,
ReplyDeleteGreat. It is certainly a very important question that you mentioned. We have Rabbi Google. What could be better ? I can even turn him off whenever I want. Yikes. I agree with you about the emphasis on empowering learning. I think it is something to explore much further.
I might note that perhaps we as educators really need to spend time talking with students about how to use the internet. How important it is to take a snack break with before and after bracha if one uses the internet for three hours. And so on. Unltimately I think we also want to give over to students that learning is wonderful and not just artificially wonderful but really wonderful.