Friday, August 6, 2010
Session 6: A Vision of Students Today
In Session 1, we watched a famous video, called The Connected Classroom. This is a more recent, but even more famous video called A Vision of Students Today... note that the video has had over 3 1/2 million viewers. However, while that video focuses on is the university classroom, another more recent video is entitled, A Vision of K-12 Students Today. What message do these videos bring to you? Do you think that teachers need to adjust or is it the students who need to adjust?
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6 comments:
This is a very powerful video, and my initial reaction is that I was thinking those same exact thoughts as I sat in college. Actually, this situation got me so angry that I wrote a letter and went in for an interview with my college’s dean. I graduated as a political science major and was forced to read about every theorist imaginable. I read about ½ of what I was supposed to and I am now over $30,000 dollars in debt. However, the part of the story that got me so upset was that I was unprepared for the real world and the jobs that it offered. I wanted to get hired as a journalist at CNN but I was unable to pass the news information quiz they gave me. I graduated summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame, and I was completely unaware of what was actually going on in the world around me. Part of the problem is that I was assigned so much reading that I never had time for current events. So, because of my personal situation, I am very supportive of this video and of changing teacher techniques for success in the real world. I would have loved for my political science classes to focus on present-day situations and examples. I try to do the same thing with my students in history classes now. We have a current events board and we discuss the news on a daily basis. There are a plethora of examples to use, but teachers stick to the textbooks, and students don’t realize the consequences until it’s too late. (Sidenote: I did get the job at CNN eventually, and was rudely awakened to find that was not what I wanted at all, which has led me right here!)
This video reminds me much of several of my undergraduate classes. I sat in enormous auditoriums with mostly empty seats. Professors lectured through a PowerPoint that did not excite nor capture my attention. Often, I brought my computer to class to provide some sort of distraction. I, like the students in this video, became an expert at multitasking. I studied, worked, and attended class all while balancing spending time with friends and exercising. Will it always be this way? As more students attend college, class sizes grow. The opportunity for student and teacher to found a relationship lessens. Students must go to extreme lengths to engage with their professors and in their classes. Class time is no longer enough. Students frequent professors’ office hours, apply for internships, and organize meetings all in an effort to be known. Most contact is constructed through email, another distant, though convenient, form of communication.
One student in that video held up a sign that read “18 percent of my teachers know my name.” That statement perfectly captures my undergraduate experience. Nearly every course in my major that I took at the University of Texas was held in an auditorium. Over one hundred students were in each class. I felt completely detached to the professors during the lecture. Classes themselves were not engaging. My professors consistently read from PowerPoints, which bored me and the rest. Where were the discussions, group work, and interactions with the teacher? My education did not meet the expectations I had given its value. Thousands of students will end their college experiences in debt. They will work during the school year in order to finance loans. Are the courses they take as valuable as the money they spend to enroll? Is their degree even going to prepare them for a potential job afterwards? Did I need to attend a small university to receive the quality of education I desired? Although I consider my undergraduate education experience irreplaceable for my academic, social, and emotional growth, I do pause to ask myself these questions.
This video and the similar one related to Elementary Education are extremely powerful. I was fortunate enough to do my undergraduate studies at Lipscomb as well. There were very few classes that my professor not only knew my name, but knew ME. I think I would have had a hard time getting lost in a massive lecture auditorium. Even in the early-mid 2000's when I was in undergrad, laptops were still not as common as they are now in the classroom. I never used a laptop in class and am sure I would have been distracted by facebook and e-mail if I had one in class. There are so many new distractions for students in the classroom today.
This video reminded me of a training class I used to do at my previous job. I did one-day training sessions with mid-level supervisors on Supervisory Skills. One of the sections of our training was a discussion on the different age ranges in the workforce today. Most of the people I was training were older than me and fell into Baby Boomer or Generation X ages. I am a millennial. The discussion was always interesting about the differences in mindset and worldview these groups have. We also discussed the idea of technology in the workplace and younger generation's willingness to engage with new technologies. We talked about the idea of the jobs our children will have are not even created yet! This is a mind-boggling idea, but as we have discussed in this class, the rate at which new technologies are becoming commonplace is incredible.
Again, as previously stated it is so difficult to tackle these issues in the classroom today. It seems as though administration is still in a mindset from 20 years ago while our students are suffering these consequences. I hope to be able to "engage" younger students as they desperately ask us to in the second video. Hopefully as a technologically minded Millennial, I can make a difference!
Both of these videos are thought provoking videos. While viewing both of these videos I kept thinking about my classroom and what technology looks like in my room. It is very unnerving to think that we are preparing students for jobs that do not exist.
When I think back to my own schooling experience I am now using technology in my classroom that did not exist when I was younger. This summer my school had a staff retreat and we had an interesting discussion about the different generations in our school. Through this discussion some very interesting statements were made. One of the issues that were brought up was how different our schooling was. My generation was on the edge of the “traditional” classroom and having technology being used by our teachers. This issue seemed to be a sensitive subject to some staff members in our school because they feel that the students should not have to have technology in order to learn. I have been in the shoes of the university students in the video. I had several teachers in college that did not do anything to engage us. If we are not engaging our students then we are not reaching them. I liked in the second video when one of the students said that only a small percentage of their teachers allowed them to create something using technology. I know that this is an area I need to improve on. I am still trying to figure out how this looks in Kindergarten but I know that my students are capable. I am very thankful that my school is using some of our title 1 money to pay the salary for a technology teacher. I have seen how much the students enjoy this. They are able to learn how to use educational websites at home. The students are able to go to the lab for about 1 hour every other week. I know this is not a significant amount of time. I want to do a better job at incorporating technology into my lessons and hope to allow my students to use it more too.
While watching this video I couldn't help but think of my college and my classes. The students who did bring their computers only got on Facebook or Twitter. Believe me the only people who wrote notes were very few and far between. Teachers HAVE to change their techniques. A lot of teachers teach the same way they have been for years or they teach the same way because they can get away with it. We need to daily strive to teach our students the way they learn. More technology has to be incorporated in our classrooms. We are daily losing our students because we do not teach using technology. The video was a wonderful display of how technology traps our students. When we do not teach our students using technology they will bring their own technology and not pay attention to the lessons we are trying to teach them.
Written by Tabitha: The 1967 quote at the beginning of this video shows that this issue is not a new concern among the educational community. Technology has changed society but students are often still stuck in an educational system that complete separates them from the way they learn and communicate with one another. Tweets, texts, emails, and blog posts present the language of learners today. Their motivations and inspirations are very different than what they used to be. This video highlights the fact that many teachers are not tapping the potential of technology to reach students in new and different ways than ever before. If we are going to prepare students for jobs that do not exist, we need to teach them how to effective use the tools at their fingertips, including computers, smart phones, and effective information filtering skills.
This video makes me consider my own classroom. Since I started my Instructional Technology Masters’ degree I have been racking my brain to figure out ways to use technology to support and help my students. Math is a tough subject for me to incorporate different types of technology on a regular basis. Even when I encourage my students to use calculators and Excel to help with their homework, they do not feel the material is relevant enough to their lives to warrant putting in the effort. Motivation through relevance is the part I most struggle with when working with students. I don’t see today the “wow” effect technology used in the classroom once had on students, even when a use may be different than anything they have ever done before. It’s tough to motivate students to prepare for jobs when we do not know what lies ahead. Is this an excuse for teachers to sit back and keep doing just what they were doing? Of course not! It is instead a call for teachers to dig deep and teach life skills instead of just their subject areas, striving to show students how they may use what they are learning for the rest of their lives, whether it is part of their career choices or not. Technology can help, but good teaching will always have the most impact.
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