Educational Technology Philosophy

In January of 1988, I returned to my 4th grade class from the holiday break with my new off-brand calculator watch. It wasn’t the fancy Casio watch that a few of my friends had, but it worked just as well. It had sixteen tiny buttons and it had all the functions of a regular elementary school calculator. What I didn’t think of was that each time you pressed one of its tiny buttons it made a very loud and piercing beep. As you can probably guess, when I tried to use it during math class, I was immediately called out. The teacher called me up to the front of the class, confiscated the technological wonder from my wrist, and said something along the lines of “You won’t always have a calculator with you to solve math problems when you get older.”

I can’t think of a statement that has aged as poorly as that one.

The advancement of technology is proceeding at quite literally an astronomical pace. To think that just 120 years ago the first audio radio transmissions were sent, and the first powered, controlled flight took place. Today the gadgets in our kitchen contain more computing power than what was utilized to send people to the surface of the moon and back. We carry tablets and smart phones in our pockets that allow us to access more information with a few taps and a swipe than anyone just 25 years ago could have even dreamed of. Our kids easily navigate the internet before they can even read.

No longer are classrooms stocked with chalkboards, overhead projectors, and boxes of sharpened pencils. Today our children and their teachers use iPads, smartboards and gamification apps like Kahoot, ClassDojo, and SeeSaw. School libraries, while still vital to our kids’ education, now feel somewhat quaint as every book can now be found much quicker and cheaper online. These tools have been designed to help students learn more information faster than ever before, but we don’t yet live in the Matrix. We can’t learn simply be having information dumped directly into our brains.

Technology is a powerful education tool which should act as one piece of a larger puzzle. Technology can facilitate learning, but it must be accompanied by real world experiences, hand-on activities, and opportunities for understanding and exercising creativity of thinking. In fact, a recent Gallup poll reported that students who are assigned use technology in transformative ways are 2.5 times more likely to practice creativity in learning, which favors understanding of concepts over memorization of facts (Ferrari et al, 2009).

The future is happening right now, and it cannot be ignored. Students expect to be taught about and with technology at every level but those lessons must be accompanied by real world experiences. Hands on activities. Students must be taught how to use technology to find the answers to questions, and the skills to creatively problem solve using nothing more than their own intelligence.