Changing Education for the Information Age
A parent of one of my students sent me this video link today. Take a look and I will meet you down below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8
When I watch a video like this (I have seen similar one before) I feel extremely overwhelmed. The amount of knowledge and information out there is so huge. I find myself constantly saying that the combined knowledge of the world is at our fingertips and we just need to start taking advantage of it. Look at the growth of Facebook, and that was primarily with college students. Also, Facebook was free and televisions weren’t but those number are still huge.Now, I wonder if Twitter is going to beat that to be biggest fastest.
That there are more texts sent each day then people in the world, Holy Cow! Adults often just mock the younger generation and their texting, but to ignore the phenomenon is just ignorant. The Technology Tailor on WGN Radio, Alex Goldstein (or something like that) constantly mocksFacebook and Twitter and says he has no need for them, but it is getting to a point where you don’t have a choice. The world is communicating in these ways, and people who shun the technological change will be like people who rejected TV for radio until that battle was over.
I love knowledge and information, but I think we need to figure out how to handle all of it and what exactly it is that we need to teach kids. The fact that a weeks worth of newspaper is equivalent to a lifetime of knowledge for a previous generation (I don’t remember which century) is staggering. And schools now are trying to teach all of it to kids by the time they are 18. Information that used to be taught to seniors is now taught to freshmen and they are often not ready to hear it and don’t retain it.
Fundamentally I often think we need to take a step back and evaluate what we are teaching and train students to be learners independent of what they learn. I have often thought to myself that my true goal is to make myself obsolete. I have not accomplished this yet, but it would be a glorious day if we could equip all students with the skills to fight for those jobs that aren’t even thought of yet.
That in and of itself is a powerful idea and I am going to mention that the reason they have to learn whatever area of physics hasn’t been invented yet so they better pay attention. 
Popularity: unranked [?]
Tags: Facebook, School, Teaching, technology, texting, twitter, wgn radio
