Over the last 7 weeks I have been working at completing the fourth course of my Masters programme with Walden University. The most recent course has taught me about the implications and impact of technology on education, work and society and how the didactics of teaching are changing in order for us to teach our students the 21st century skills that they need to succeed when they leave school. I have discovered that the world is moving from a 'technological age' into a 'conceptual age' where creativity and critical thinking skills are the things that will be in demand in the future as technologies continue to replaces jobs that use a large element of logic or processes.
This course has also given me the opportunity to learn about and experiment with using a variety of differing new technologies with my classes such as blogs, wikis and podcasts and it has changed the way that I teach some of my classes, how my students submit their work and how they collaborate to solve problems. My students have experimented with using blogs to create digital portfolios rather than submitting their work on paper, they have used wiki's to collaborate to complete their analysis and research assignments and they use pod and vodcasts to record the processes that they go through in order to manufacture their products.
As technology continues to become an integral part of the learning experiences for our students it is clear that this is also effecting the role of the teacher and how lessons are organized and structured. Teachers should no longer be 'lecturing' students in regimented rows where students listen and take notes as the teacher delivers the content 'top down'. Teaching should now be more about facilitating learning and providing our students with project based learning experiences where students discover the skills, knowledge and understanding by collaborating with their peers and using technology to solve problems. These kind of project based learning experiences will not only teach our students the content of the curriculum in a fun, motivating and productive way, it will also teach them the 21st century skills (p21.org) that they will need to use as they join the workforce once they exit school.
In order for teachers to provide their students with quality learning experiences they need to keep up to date with new and emerging technologies by continuing to take professional development courses, being comfortable and willing to adapt and trial new technology in the classroom and also investing and using new technologies in their private and work lives.
Since taking this course, I have become motivated to change some of the ways that I manage my units and my goal over the next few years is for my students to increase the amount that they collaborate to solve problems whilst also having all of their design portfolios available online and digitized. I experimented with having a small group of students from one of my classes using wiki's to collaborate to complete the analysis and research for one of the problems that I set for them and the results were impressive. Working as a team to solve the problem really helped to produce a piece of work that was of very high quality and depth and the outcome was far superior to the majority of work completed by students who were working alone.
