With or Without Technology: That is the Question

Can we teach without technology? A question that we considered when we first started our first session of course two! Honestly, living in the third millennium and teaching first-century students makes it unbelievable even to think of classrooms could be manageable without having our mobile devices, microcomputers and such as the huge active component of the teaching/ learning recipe.

Since my very first lecture here at SUNY, I had been thinking about the benefits of integrating technology and what it has to offer to both educators and learners. I mean throwing a laptop or an iPad in students’ hands; here you go guys with this project or that assignment is farthest we could be from the answer of the quest of actually finding the real purpose of taking proper advantage of the tools available in the third millennium in order to reach out to our digital native learners. But what is the secret ingredient in teaching/learning recipe? Is it possible to teach the same content and same concepts using no technology? How would integrating the right technology be successful? So many questions and so little time we give ourselves to reflect on our teaching methodologies that we often implement unconsciously in our classrooms.

I personally think that “balance” is the key and probably the secret behind weighing the pros and cons of integrating technological hardware and software in classrooms. It’s important not to overdo stuff or anything for that matter in life meaning less is more sometimes! Less of so much void technology for the sake of entertaining and showing off as a millennial teacher is much needed. Technology is definitely required and sought after as an essential component in nowadays twenty-first century classrooms but educators have to keep in mind that they represent the human aspect of the teaching/ learning process, so they have to maintain their composure as the controller and facilitators of learning and as it’s their duty to actually conduct teaching, start interacting and stimulate engaging of their students and technology only supplements what is missing as to achieve the best way of understanding new concepts and original content. They have to act as good leaders in their own classrooms as mentioned by Simon Sinek that our world lacks actual leaders who are able to slowly build personal relationships with others. Therefore, that is an essential quality that our millennial educators have to learn more about in order to cope with their own characteristics that qualify them to lead their students to be better learners and consequently the best versions of themselves in the future, and those ones that would see them push and empower those youngsters to act as efficient people in their society.

This generation of digital native learners is so much dependent on learning through screens, interacting through emoji’s and socially engaging through buttons instead of consciously facing the real world and getting the sense of the real fresh air. Once they realize that they are alive, breathing human souls,only then, they would appreciate their own environments, their lives and they would learn to be kind to themselves and to others. Only then, they would learn that they MATTER and eventually they will have an impact on the world. They will learn that their purpose in this life is to be humans and whatever comes with it, true they have to be better, more educated, more informed, more open-minded, more self-dependent, more of practically everything compared to our ancestors and given what we have from luxuries and privileges that the previous generations simply didn’t even dream of experiencing.  But it is also crucial for us all whether we are educators or learners to remember to refine above anything that gets in the middle of our humanity and our human soul. Never underestimate the touch, the smile, the look, the taste, the sound, the pleasure of existing and living as each day represents a new journey in a world that has been overcrowded and sabotaged by materialism.