Last week I wrote a post about the technology in the classroom debate. The main point being that we need to be careful of becoming so focussed on our philosophy of teaching that we exclude what others are doing that works. There has been a lot of discussion about this post (especially over at LinkedIn) about the use of technology and the benefits / negatives of using technology in the classroom.
Over the last few days I have noticed the increasing divide of teacher opinion and the unwillingness of teachers to be willing to embrace others ideas and attitudes. This has left me wondering whether this will ultimately result in…
2 classes of teachers!
I predict that the increasing pressure to use technology in the classroom will become a divisive issue for teachers simply because of the rate of change that we are now facing.
In the past teachers resisted new technology such as overhead projectors but that was the only change they had to deal with until years later teachers started using PowerPoint…but by that time most teachers had time to adapt to overheads and then took their time with PowerPoint.
Now there is new technology emerging every few months so there is just no lag time for slow adapters. I can see that some teachers will continue to quickly adapt to these changes but others will just fall further and further behind and thus the technology gap will continue widen.
I guess the good news in all of this is that there is more to effective teaching than our ability to use technology. That been said I wonder whether there will be a new class divide of haves and have nots…
What do you think?
