Times are most certainly changing. I didn’t have an email account until I was 20. I didn’t own a mobile phone until I was 22 – my children find that shocking! Technology is omnipresent now though and, like it or not, the teaching methods of schools and colleges are in most cases embracing it.
Pre-schoolers are already tech savvy; it’s quite normal for a one year old to swipe the TV screen then look confused that you appear to have not yet upgraded to the latest 4K touchscreen for your living room. Smartboards have been in general use in many nursery schools for several years and the children of 3 or 4 years of age who interact with them are as comfortable with tech as they are with coloured building blocks.
There are even cute caterpillar toys that can teach a 3 year old to code, and baby maths interactive experiences online. There are also soft toys which can send messages to each other, via an app that an adult moderates. Surely as long as it’s fun and interactive, it’s all good for development, right? Everything in moderation.
Should we ensure that our children are ready for the tech life that they are already living. After all we exist in a world where it would be hard to secure employment or even get on well with higher education if we didn’t feel comfortable with technology. But will all this tech stop them from learning to write properly? Will the new generation be even worse at mental arithmetic than we are? Will they even use normal speech to talk to each other?
Children, especially younger children, just want to interact and play with whatever you offer them – give them some good old chalk and boards any day, or even better the chance to swing from a tree in an old tyre at playtime. It’s just that there is more out there in the new world of tech – from the games on mobile phones and tablets that interest even the youngest players, only requiring the user to be proficient in touching a screen, to spy missions parties with tracking technologies, message decoding and even lie detector tests! Children are used to technology, so a certain amount of tech in the classroom or for homework purposes is surely a good thing.
My 4 year old already loves learning maths with Marvin the Monkey on a laptop – he’s young so it’s stays very interactive with a real human being sitting next to him (me). He’s certainly engaged for much longer and learns more that perhaps he would with a pen and paper, although he does enjoy writing sums out the old fashioned way too.
It seems though that our teenagers are harder to save. Has their immersion in technology, before we saw the risks, led to our teenagers already losing the ability to even speak to each other? They sit next to each other, smiling at the comments one of them has just posted or the message they’ve just received from their friend – it’s gone from the phone next to them, via the cloud and back down to where they are sitting and the message has got through without either “friend” uttering a word.
Uninvited tech in the classroom can of course be a huge struggle for teachers: students on their mobile phones, which many schools and colleges still allow, distracted by You Tubing, Instagramming, taking selfies, plagiarising Wikipedia….and not doing much learning. But it’s is also easy to see how technology can improve learning in the classroom for teens, even from the point of view of getting them interested and engaged in the first place. Its surely the “right” use of technology and complemented by human interaction that wins out. Teachers emailing their students their homework or pointers, podcasts shared with educational content, Webquests asking pupils to research a topic on the web, class blogs or wikis, grading and results published online. Parents are generally communicated to primarily through emails and ParentMail type apps as well as interacting with each other via Facebook (those last minute “don’t forget tomorrow is dress-up day” reminders!). If you don’t tech, you won’t keep up!
Interactive whiteboards certainly have the potential, particularly in the minds of the teaching staff, to increase student participation, but as is very often the case with technology, the human controlling it directly influences the actual results.
Everything in moderation they say. And of course that is true, plus dependence on the proficiency and intelligence of teaching staff and the culture of the school. You can research their credentials online…