Blog Juice for Educational Technology

As I’ve mentioned before, my daughter has started her student teaching in a high school in the mountains.  We’ve had a number of short conversations, mostly her describing potential lessons, which are quite creative, and me pointing out potential shortfalls and making suggestions.  Very little to nothing about technology.  That would require too much conversation and she doesn’t have enough time.

She’s starting to stress out a bit, as her time to actually begin teaching approaches, and it isn’t (according to her) the fear of facing a class.  She’s trying to figure out how to present content to her class.  She has a laptop, but the school has only two or three projectors.  TVs are more plentiful, but connecting her laptop to the TV will require more hardware.  She is struggling as to how to present what she wants to present, the way she wants to present it — and the response that I do not dare speak to her is, “Welcome to the real world.”

Here’s the point of my sharing this.  My daughter, like most (if not all) of her friends have been using computers as their principal information tool for much of their lives.  Although their high school experience was relatively technology-poor, nearly all of their writing was on computer, and a significant, if not majority, of their research was networked and digital.

Virtually all of her college classmates came to school, four years ago, with a laptop slung over their shoulder or a desktop dominating their desks.  Although their classes were still predominantly lecture and textbook-based, all of the classrooms had projectors, speakers, and teacher presentation stations, and most of her instructors at least used PowerPoint.

I frequently hear how these millennial teachers are not coming in ready to integrate technology.  However, they are coming in with a different sense of their information environment, one that knows very little boundary.  And now, she’s facing a job of teaching inside the hard walls of a classroom, the covers of a textbook, and no conduit to the world of information that is home to her and many of her students.

If I said, “Welcome to the real world.”  She’d reply, “Yeah! Welcome to the old world.”

After this experience, when she is interviewing for jobs, and the principal asks, do you have any questions?  What is she going to ask for in her teaching environment?

What is her prospective principal going to need to be able to say, in a state that is suffering a near devastating teacher shortage?

Image Citation:
Mueller, Donovan. “Inside.” Donut2D’s Photostream. 27 Aug 2005. 9 Jan 2008 <http://flickr.com/photos/donut2d/37719493/>.