#connected classroom
This morning's session made me face some of the topics in education today that I have found challenging for a while and that I have tried to understand.
Internet seems to be ubiquitous, however the way in which I as a teacher use it and perceive it, seems to be completely different from how a Middle or High School student uses internet.
It was eye-opening to perceive online-enabled devices not only as devices but as a social connection to friends and classmates.
In my classroom, I have tried to keep an open mind about what device students are using (smartphone, laptop, iPad...) if they can access the information they need, it is fine with me. I try to teach them to be critical about how they use the internet and about how they find information. It is exactly there that I find my biggest bias and challenge. It seems that I have an ingrained perception that the information on the internet and particularly wikipedia is not to be trusted. My mind was blown when confronted with the fact, that our knowledge is obsolete or wrong after 18 months. My beloved textbooks need 7 years to be published, do the math. Oh yes, and wikipedia uses citation better than most textbooks and guess where mistakes can be corrected within 2 minutes. Exactly, online: wikipedia... There is a paradigm change in education, where teachers need to take a leap to change from digital immigrants to digital natives or near-natives.
This morning's session made me face some of the topics in education today that I have found challenging for a while and that I have tried to understand.
Internet seems to be ubiquitous, however the way in which I as a teacher use it and perceive it, seems to be completely different from how a Middle or High School student uses internet.
It was eye-opening to perceive online-enabled devices not only as devices but as a social connection to friends and classmates.
In my classroom, I have tried to keep an open mind about what device students are using (smartphone, laptop, iPad...) if they can access the information they need, it is fine with me. I try to teach them to be critical about how they use the internet and about how they find information. It is exactly there that I find my biggest bias and challenge. It seems that I have an ingrained perception that the information on the internet and particularly wikipedia is not to be trusted. My mind was blown when confronted with the fact, that our knowledge is obsolete or wrong after 18 months. My beloved textbooks need 7 years to be published, do the math. Oh yes, and wikipedia uses citation better than most textbooks and guess where mistakes can be corrected within 2 minutes. Exactly, online: wikipedia... There is a paradigm change in education, where teachers need to take a leap to change from digital immigrants to digital natives or near-natives.
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