BWP Chapter 10 | What it all means.

BWP Chapter 10 | What it all means.
The technology revolution is causing the sea of information to continue to grow quickly. The combination of new material, old material, and pre-internet information being scanned and digitized is creating a comprehensive source of info. With so many new sources of information, teachers need to extensively teach students how to become editors/skeptics of online content.

Most of the tools found on the net and the new programs allow/encourage collaboration. This is good because the workplace is doing this too. We must help students prepare for their futures.

I need to show students how to obtain, store, organize, and recall information. The sea of knowledge is growing. That does not mean that our brains will automatically begin growing too. Students will be expected to take in a lot of information and that information will be useless if they are not able to access it when it really counts. I will model use of various tools like Delicious, so that way they can keep an organized collection of material they have learned/ viewed before.

This newest way of education and life-long learning will absolutely require learners to share information and collaborate to synthesis new wholes. Making connections will be vital! These connections will be important because it will help students with their research and to prepare for their future.

Students used to not able to access information outside of school as easily as they can now. In many ways this can be good because it allows students to learn more of what they want and be excited to do it out of class. On the other hand, what if some students just plain don’t like to learn and are not interested what so ever in learning more than they are directly exposed to in the classroom? It is not fair of me to expect them to keep up like the other students who are excelling through extracurricular studying.

Most of the noted “shifts” are directly tied to each other. To sum up shifts 2-5 I could say, teachers and learners alike will need to connect with many others, 24/7, where ever they are because this will provide the best opportunity for constructing meaningful collaborative knowledge. Wherever, whenever, however, together with whomever!

It is amazing how for so long we have felt that the best education came from countless worksheets to be handed out, completed, returned and thrown away. For the fraction of knowledge actually retained in one’s memory after the paper hits the trashcan, we should be working to complete tasks that add to the world around us. Do something that really matters, something will still be evident long after the paper would have hit the trashcan.

I think that the most important idea of this entire book is that teachers need to be good models. Teachers need to model the different tools available to students and they need to model how important collaboration can be. Students have become smarter than the teachers when it comes to working with technology. Instead of constantly focusing on content, teachers will need to demonstrate methods to get to content. Teachers need to be more like coaches that will guide students to appropriate, effective, educational used of these technological tools. One of my favorite quotes is, “Its not about the destination, its about the journey!” That could not be more true when considering the changing roles of teachers in the classrooms. I think that teachers will become much like travel agents. Think about it, when someone is interested in visiting a specific destination but they don’t know the best way to get there or what to expect when they get there, they consult a professional for help. The travel agent is normally not an expert about the specific destination, and probably has never even been there before, but they are experts on the tools to guide you to the right choices. So if we allow the students to become generally interested in a topic of their choice we can help them get there, even if we are not experts ourselves on that specific content.