Tech, My Students and Me
I’m at the Tech conference and the same theme keeps emerging: students know more about technology than we do. Students are the digital natives, we are the digital immigrants. Students use the technology in more creative ways and collaborate more than we have ever even imagined. Students use digital tools without thinking about it.
Here’s a scenario. I was driving to the conference in Dover and on the radio was a podcast, a recording, of the American Idol special that aired the night before. The radio announcer provided some commentary about the show and then played a clip from the show that was available on UTube.
American Idol is a show that really interests me. The conversation and information that I received over the traditional radio actually came from a web source – U-tube. I went to a conference session and found out that I could download the American Idol songs from U-Tube to my I-tunes and then my IPod. I didn’t know that. There is so much that I don’t know that I want to just block out a week of my time and do nothing but work on the Internet to find out more about these emerging technologies and how I can use them in the classroom.
Maybe I should ask my students.
