Blog Assignment #2

Did You Know?

While watching “Did You Know? 3.0- A John Strange Version” and “Did You Know 3.0” , my brain literally wanted to explode! Those were some interesting facts about technology in our world. It goes to show how dependent we actually are on technology. However, I must say that I am not surprised by some of the statistics when other countries were compared with the United States. Although I feel that we are technologically advanced here in America I have always felt that other countries have been a step ahead of us. Hence the startling fact that 25% of India’s population with the highest IQ’s is greater than the total population of the United States. That fact is literally mind blowing to me!

The most startling fact stated in Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod’s video is that we are currently preparing students for jobs that do not even exist yet. This tells me that I need to step up my game as an educator. Even though I have a couple of years before I graduate I need to be keeping up with the latest technology now because once I graduate with my degree there is no telling what all will be invented by then! Technology seems to be a never-ending journey. It is already predicted that by the year 2049 that a computer that costs $1000 dollars will exceed the computational capabilities of the entire human species. It looks like we have lots of work to do as educators to prepare our students for this kind of technological future!

Mr. Winkle

Mr Winkle is an old man who had fallen asleep for one hundred years. The time when he fell asleep there was little to no technology in the world. When he awakes from his long slumber he realizes he ‘is not in Kansas anymore”. Everything looks, sounds, and acts differently now. He notices these machines in the office spaces and hospitals that print things, machines that keep people alive, and even machines that allow people to talk from another country away! Mr. Winkle makes his way down to the nearest school to see if he could find any relief there, and he did. He noticed that everything seemed like it did when he was in school: taking notes, the teacher just talking, and no weird looking machines. Except there was one he noticed, but it was collecting dust in the back of the classroom. Mr. Winkle finally found his happy place.

I can only hope that Mr. Winkle would not be able to find many schools like he did in the ending of this video. Like I mentioned of the videos above, we are teaching our students to live/work in a world that will have devices that are not even invented yet. Even though it might be hard to adapt to the rapid development of technology around us, I feel that it is our job as educators to be just as engaged as our students are with new technology. Even though we might not have grown up with what they have now we have to adapt to their level of technology and learning so that way they can engage on a deeper level.

Sir Ken Robinson

In his video The Importance of Creativity, Sir Ken Robinson argues that we are more concerned with educating students to become good workers rather than creative thinkers. It made me stop and think about my education growing up and if I was encouraged to be creative, and I do not think I can honestly say yes. He has definitely put a new perspective on teaching for me. He mentioned that all children are born with creative thinking, and we tend to educate them out of it.

When Sir Ken said “Creativity is now as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status” was a huge shock for me! I think when we think about creativity we think of art class or a drama class and that is the only places we should show our creativity. How wrong was I? A great example of this was when he told the story of the three wise men during the Christmas play. Instead of ‘Frankincense’ the child interpreted it as ‘Frank sent this’, how clever! That goes to show the creativity of a child’s mind and to think that we could be stripping that away slowly in our classrooms is frightening.

Glass, Schools, and the Future

When watching the videos on Corning's glass I must say I was not able to take my eyes off the screen, I was that infatuated with it. My mind can literally not even wrap around the technology that was being displayed. To think that this is what our future will be like is so exciting. The announcer in one of the videos said that the tablets shown would be used just as frequently as cell phones are today. Almost everyone has a cell phone, and to think that we will all have glass tablets seems foreign to me right now. However, technology is advancing more rapidly than I can imagine!

So what does this mean for our schools and the future? Like mentioned above, we have some serious teaching to do to get our students ready for this kind of future. Not only do we have to teach our students we have to teach ourselves. We need to be taking every opportunity to learn about a new device that comes out and to familiarize ourselves with it. It really puts into perspective of how important it is to educate our children on the right things, unlike the class in Mr. Winkles world. From watching these videos I have a feeling there will be no more pencils and paper in the future, everything will be done on a ‘tablet’ or a screen of glass, so it seems.