Great teacher + Great technology = Great Education

I am a woman who is seeking to evolve as an educator and thus develop my professional skills as both an educator and a human being. Since people are never too old to learn, having such a nice-spirited, supportive and cooperative team ready to pass out their knowledge and expertise in the form of my colleagues is beyond phenomenal. Obviously, being in an educated and in a more sophisticated environment triggers motivation, dedication and enthusiasm right away within me. I love it already and so grateful that something like this came up. 

The first lecture was an eye-popping one! The professors gave me so much to think about. Questions that would never cross my mind in a million year, like how connected should an educator be to meet the needs of twenty-first century and third millennium students? Does an educator need to be part of a professional learning network to keep up-to-date with the new methodologies, techniques and programs that are evolving around the world every second?! There is so much to think about and hopefully more to act upon, for only by educating ourselves we can educate new generations!

That is being said: here are my thoughts on the video presented by Dr. Craig Blewett. It was definitely thought-provoking. It got me thinking about how is learning taking place in a world dominated by binary language? Are we as educators “educated” enough to understand the kids who are fluent in this language? How can we reach up to them on their terms using the technological tools available for us to achieve maximum momentum access in to their brains? Do we have a pedagogical strategy in order to actually manage that?

All of those questions and more have popped up in my face after I watched the video presented by Dr. Craig Blewett. For someone who usually has a lot to share, I was left speechless.

Things have definitely changed with technology around us. It controls a lot of aspects of our lives, and life seems meaningless and old-fashioned to say the least without it.

Having the state-of-the-art technology in fields such as science, business, medicine made them competitive but technology has failed to impress as to meet up with the needs of the education field. But why?! I wonder. Maybe teachers or educators are misusing the tools provided to them or maybe they have no idea how to actually cope up with the advanced methods of teaching or maybe they don’t have a manual to guide them through or hmmmm…..

Personally, I think to evolve we need to have a bullet-proof plan in order to catch up with twenty-first century students, a plan that involves a pedagogy that works! We have to be able to design if there isn’t! Dr. Blewett mentioned in his video the following:

Great teacher + Great technology = Great Education

Theoretically, this formula should work unless a major component is missing!  He went on to say that there are three factors that primarily contribute to making it happen:

1-Technological Knowledge (the how skills)

2-Content Knowledge (the written information)

3-Pedagogical Knowledge (the strategy and concepts of application and mixture of the aforementioned)

The latter is basically what drives and motivates advanced and connected educators to instigate the process of transforming the educational system and consequently students from passive consumers of information into active producers. However, one might argue and say because we consume so much information, we will be able to produce once intrigued. I do agree with Dr. Blewett that a lot of consumption will cause blockage and draining of energy as students should have an incentive that will drive them to curate the information they search for. For example, I used to ask my students to find information about any topic in mind instead of just handing them the information. This will refresh their brain power and awaken their dormant talents of tech-skills to actually use it appropriately instead of just encouraging them to pick it up from their books or having me handed it to them.

Change has to start within us; therefore, at the end of this course I hope to fix my tech glitches by learning, growing and evolving to become a better connected and tech-skilled educator who can communicate with this cyber generation. We have to live up to the so-called “Digital Age” by working it to our advantage and manipulating the tools to reach the best outcome and hence creating a more creative and interactive environment for both educators and students as Dr. Blewett mentioned that we should strive to have a pedagogy driven and not an app driven classrooms.