Referenced Article: Tina Barseghian, “Five Ways to Bring High-Tech Ideas Into Low-Tech Classrooms,” Mind Shift, September 8, 2011.
Technology has clearly proved itself important in education from elementary school through university-level classes in my earlier blog posts. Helping students to become more aware of their modern surroundings in society, technology-based education can better prepare children for computer-based careers in the future. This conclusion is by no means universal; others continue to argue that technology hinders the classroom experience by taking away from time spent on traditional learning. These clashing opinions meet at an interesting point: what happens to students who are not provided with advanced enough materials to even consider having high technology in the classroom? Tina Barseghian’s article touches on exactly that dilemma, offering solutions to technologically educate students even when they do not have high-tech materials with them in the classroom. Not only does this separate students from potentially distracting high technology, but it reconciles this lack of computer-based tools with the integration of technological ideas into class work.
Barseghian’s article offers five main ways to accomplish this feat of merging high-tech and low-tech environments. She suggests “putting the Facebook page on paper,” encouraging students to use terminology such as “status updates” and a “wall” to engage students in their work (e.g. analyzing literature) by making it more relevant to the more familiar social networking of their life outside of school. She also suggests using reference books to make a “classroom search engine” where students can seek information. Keeping them motivated by books, the reference to a search engine can encourage discussion of how companies like “Google , Yahoo, and Bing” developed and achieved success. She goes on to recommend that students “tweet” in class by writing no more than twenty words on a particular subject on a piece of paper. This carries over into the general idea of a blog or “chat room” made up of sticky notes on a whiteboard to encourage written discussion. Finally, Berseghian encourages sporadic exercises in “text talk” in which students can write in whatever short form they choose so long as they get their idea across, allowing them to speak normally and fully express their ideas without worrying about the words they choose in the classroom.
How do Barseghian’s ideas shed light on technology in the classroom? They certainly take the technology of the modern world and incorporate it into education where it lacks in technological tools. Berseghian’s ideas could most certainly help students relate to their course materials and are extremely creative ways of approaching learning to engage the students. Unfortunately, these ideas ultimately lack in technological credibility. Despite their names and relation to Internet communication, Berseghian’s ideas are, more or less, traditional classroom tools that are simply inspired by the much more complex world of technological communication. At the end of the day, Berseghian’s tools do not teach students the fundamentals of working with technology; they only encourage students to think in similar styles to Internet users. This creative style of teaching could perhaps be more effective in an environment in which technology is already somewhat present in students’ lives, helping them to combine multiple methods of learning. As for classrooms where high technology is not available, Berseghian offers a unique alternative to keep students aware of what is going on outside their classroom and in greater modern society.
The author's intent seems good, but I can see some major flaws with some of the techniques. For example, using textspeak to share ideas with each other would have the effect of having the conversation brought down onto a more accessible level for students. However, we need to be teaching our students to convey their ideas in a concise, specific manner that will benefit them in their later careers, not just saying things in any way that gets their point across in the end.
ReplyDeleteSomething that would take the 'magic' out of the idea of 'status updates' on the classroom whiteboard is that it lacks the instant quality that we have come to expect from our social media. Thinking things through, writing them out on paper and posting them on a physical board is a far cry from the on-the-fly thinking and typing that most Facebook users do, and I wonder how well the students would acclimate to that.
Also, the thing about Facebook walls and newsfeeds is that they're not graded, and people can post up whatever they want without worrying about grammar and spelling. I can't see them being very effective in the classroom, where, if the teacher is viewing them, the students would put just as much effort and word choice into them as they would with a traditional paper, thus defeating the purpose. If the teachers don't grade the grammar, however, we end up with the same problem that I first pointed out.
In short, even though I like the idea of bringing better technology to low-tech classrooms, I think it would be an uncomfortable (for everyone) mix between formal and informal, and the ideas of 'instantaneous' and 'well-thought-out' seem too irreconcilable to me for this to work at all.