September 2005 — Editorial
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Old Trends, New Twist
Recent focus on student technology use outside school shows how technology tools can impact the classroom.
Kids are different today,
I hear ev’ry mother say
—Rolling Stones, “Mother’s Little Helper,” Aftermath, 1966
I have called myself an obnoxious optimist at different times. What I mean is that I can see
the good in some events or trends, or see positive possibilities occurring more rapidly
than less obnoxious optimists do. Part of this comes from teaching, coaching, and seeing
the power of the self-fulfilling prophesy—if you think you can sink a putt in golf, you will have a much better chance of doing so than if you don’t think you can. That is why serious athletes spend a lot of time “visualizing” the perfect execution of their sport. It is also why we as educators spend so much time trying to ensure success in student learning. As we know, successful experiences engender additional successful experiences.
All this is not to say that we futurists are Pollyannas, believing that nothing but good can happen because that is what we want. It d'es, however, point to the importance of the future’s positive images, and explains why I tend to be an obnoxious optimist at times. And it is with my obnoxious optimist lens that I write of two positive “trend-lets” I am seeing in technology and education: 1) a focus on students, and 2) a focus on integrating technology. “Nothing new,” say you, but each of these has a twist.
Focusing on Students
The focus on students is not new in that all teachers focus on students—that is their job. In addition, the standards movement as well as No Child Left Behind and its testing have required teachers to look at each student against every standard. The focus on students that I am referring to is unique to technology and education, because we are beginning to examine how students function with technology outside of school. As we see by the Rolling Stones reference above, it is not new to observe that kids are different today, but today’s kids are different partially due to technology and how they interact with it.
Bringing gaming into the classroom. Two outstanding examples of explaining the difference came this summer at conferences. In the first, Marc Prensky, founder and CEO of Games2train, spoke to attendees at the National Educational Computing Conference (www.iste.org/necc) in Philadelphia. He took his distinction between “digital immigrants” and “digital natives” into significant detail. The comparison between how kids function, especially after school, and how educators function was both entertaining and enlightening. More impressive, however, was Prensky’s demonstration of a number of online games that students use outside of school. Some of these games engage hundreds of players at a time, involve significant collaboration, and require the highest level of thinking skills imaginable. I left the session wondering how we could make it acceptable for all to include games like these as a regular part of the teaching and learning process. There is no doubt that they can help kids learn content, processes, skills, and attitudes; the real question to me was making them acceptable, and training teachers to use them effectively.
