During the campaign, the Senator said:
"Business leaders are intensifying their call for schools to retool their curriculum. A new report makes a strong economic case for why students must learn key 21st-century skills. And Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has highlighted an education plan that addresses the need to meet rising global challenges."These are just two of the many quotes made by President elect Obama about education and technology education in particular during his campaign. Great ideas. Business is always clamoring for better workers. In the last couple of decades of the 20th Century, we heard lots of noise about preparing our students to be 21st Century savvy. We haven't done it. In fact technology use in schools has waned from those early halcyon days of computing. The government got involved and we all know what happens, then. Things come to a screeching halt and even regress as technology use in schools has. We are in the 21st Century and no one in government has a clue about education let alone using technology in education for the 21st Century.
"While technology has transformed just about every aspect of our lives--from the way we travel, to the way we communicate, to the way we look after our health--one of the places where we've failed to seize its full potential is in the classroom," he said in a speech earlier this year. He has proposed creating a $500 million matching Technology Investment Fund that would build on existing federal ed-tech programs to help ensure that technology is fully integrated throughout U.S. schools. "
The main problem and stumbling block to realizing these ideas is that we do not have leaders who understand how technology works in education. If we did, we would be using technology beautifully right now. We don't and obviously they don't have a clue, because technology is not being used well in our schools. Just the other day a teacher brought a high school class into the lab to create a document using a popular software. He was amazed at how little they knew about this program and couldn't complete the project because they couldn't use one of the most basic and simplest of software. Yet these very students are brilliant with MySpace, facebook, and finding those sneaker sites on the Internet. Schools have not learned how to teach students to use the tools of the technology that will advance them in the world because they have been weighed down with silly and useless programs that are bereft of technology. Children today are preparing for tests not in using technology correctly for better learning.
Technology is just one more toy added to the many technologies in schools that have been used badly and have become toys. We have not had proper or correct leadership from the government or from schools of education on the correct use of technology in our schools. At issue is that we are looking at the use of technology from our own perspective. That means we are relying on looking at education through a lens of how we were taught and that won't work. The teachers in this country who use technology well, were not students in a technology class when they were young. They thought outside the box, shed the trappings of technophobia, and discovered a way to make technology useful and helpful in the education of our 21st Century scholars. We need people with the vision to use the technology in the first place to be present when officials begin to figure out how to use technology effectively. Otherwise these new officials will simply be spinning their wheels and trying to reinvent something that already exists without success because they will be using the wrong caliper. The problem is they wouldn't recognize a successful technology program if it bit them on the thumb.
I would suggest that this Internet savvy president do some searching on his own and see who exactly is doing anything productively in their classrooms with technology. I am amazed still when I read articles like Richardson's and even those in educational journals about how ignorant everyone is about successful use of technology in schools. The reason for this ignorance is that they are still using assessment tools of the past and non technology ways to teach to assess teaching with technology. We have a wrong criteria and maybe we should think of apples and oranges. Pre technology teaching would be the apples, while the new way of using technology is the oranges. We can't compare apples and oranges. If change is going to happen we must change the way we assess education, we must change the way we use technology, and maybe we should change schools and let technology be free to let teachers who understand technology show us. If we want change, people should accept that technology is here and we should learn how to use it correctly.
Free my technology now. Many of the other Bloggers linked from here, know how to use technology and they have links on their blogs and webpages to other teachers who know how to use technology. Social networking, something that is blocked in schools. Yet these are not the people being asked or looked at to help change education. I still see and hear the old guard, who never got technology then and certainly don't get it now, giving advice. Education still ain't of the people, for the people, by the people. Sorry Professors Dewey and Freire.
Education is the last place change occurs. Consider that a teacher from the 1890's could walk into most schools today and teach. No other profession can say that about someone from the 1890's walking into their profession and functioning. We are stuck in this quicksand because politicians, not pedagogues, are making educational decisions. It is similar to accountants making medical decisions. So I HOPE we have CHANGE that I can believe in. Get the pedagogues involved in the conversations, Mr President.
Now President Obama is the time to show us, to roll up the ole sleeves and to get busy, and please stop telling me. We are well aware of what you say you will do, the future of which you have so eloquently spoken about is here, it is called the present. The time for talk is over cause now is the time for that action about which you have spoken. Please show me, show us. We are hungry for a change, we voted. Are you up to it? Can you deliver? I hope so. We all hope so. Good luck and keep education in the forefront of all change and it will happen. Change always starts with education.
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