Julia Kiss’ Blog

This post is written in reply to a post by Maree Skillen, titled “Who’s teaching who?”, taken from her website “Monkey Scribbles”, which was written in regard to an article by Head, B. (September 2008). Who’s Teaching Who? Education Review: Technology Guide.

My initial attention to this blog came from the opening statement… Did you know that “This year’s crop of Year 12 students was born at the same time as the first web browser (Head, 2008)?” And no i didn’t know. Whats even more interesting is that i cannot even remember what it was like before the internet. I remember the first time i learn t how to use the internet, i couldn’t get my head around the idea of being connected to so much information and i randomly believed in my head that every thing i searched on it was contained inside the big box sitting next to the screen.

So now that i have admitted to that bit of information we can get to the rest of the issue. Skillen raises an interesting point, originally stated by a John Pegg (professor at the university of New England, 2007), “a profound gap between what people hope rolling out computers into schools will do, and what will more likely be achieved”.

This brings me back to one of my earlier blogs “Expensive boxes”. I noted here that ”simply dumping computers at schools will be of no great benefit if teachers are unwilling to use them and there’s no money to actually make them work”. Pegg like minded, continues in saying that “Just paying for computers to be installed in schools is the easy option … the hard work is the professional development of teachers and updating of assessment techniques”. This is an important issue not only in terms of teachers just going out into the workforce and learning the initial :”digital technique”. But ongoing development which is necessary in order to keep up with the major changes that consistently lead to newer and varied technologies. Especially as a science teacher it is absolutely necessary to re invigorate out sense of what is out there, what is available to us and how to best use it. This leads to another important, and again already brought up issue… it is fine to be able to use technology but WE MUST know how to use it as it is needed and not just for technologies sake. We hardly have enough time to teach our students what they “need” to know let alone “cuffufle” around wasting time setting things up when it will be of no benefit in giving students a deeper and better understanding of anything.

Do you realize if it weren’t for Edison we’d be watching TV by candlelight?

~Al Boliska