- Does your current school have Smart Boards or similar technology - IN EVERY CLASSROOM - and have all teachers been fully trained to use them? Overwhemingly the answer is NO.
- Does every student have access to a computer terminal of some sort - ALL DAY IN
EVERY CLASS? That's usually a resonding NO as well. The rest of the world is sitting at computers all day long, but our students are not. Furthermore we have almost eliminated the practice of handwriting, but have not spent much time teaching keyboarding skills, so we have a generation of kids using the hunt and peck system. Ironically, most of them have much more advanced technology in their homes. - How about the physical layout and design of the school? Pretty much the same.
And on it goes - students sit in desks made of metal and plastic rather that wood, but they are just as uncomfortable as the ones we sat in back in our day. Classrooms are poorly lit, many without any sunlight, teachers are using black (or green or gray or white) boards and ancient overhead projectors, but if Rip Van Winkle woke up in a school today, he'd have no trouble recognizing it!
We are teaching 21st Century kids in 20th or 19th Century schools. There are the exceptions, but they are few and far between. We as teachers need to be aware of the possibilities for better schools and advocate for our students (and ourselves.) Many of us remember when the rest of the world was Xeroxing and we were still hand-cranking out our purple dittos! We whined, but did very little about it. We were about a decade behind with that technology and so it still is for so much of the new technology.
Want to see what is possible? A great source is the free online magazine from the world of the George Lucas Educational Foundation: Edutopia. Check it out at www.edutopia.org
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