While not having worked as a classroom instructor, I have seen various technologies employed by other educators, with predictably mixed-results as a student, and will certainly be further exposed to emerging trends here at Augsburg. Videos, including VHS, Beta, and those unwieldy and prohibitively expensive laser-discs were frequently used even through high school, ostensibly to further illustrate and clarify lesson-plans. They featured memorable montages of the Donner Party's cannibalism, cartoons on cellular mitosis, and even a history teacher who showed Monty Python's Holy Grail, which was paused every thirty seconds so we could be told of historical inaccuracies. Rarely were videos interactive, but a one-way dissemination of information from teacher to student.
Another high school English teacher used to encourage us to play music while participating in classroom collaborative writing exercises, as he knew the importance of music in our young lives, even as he likely questioned the moral turpitude of Rancid's 'Time Bomb,' blasting from his overworked Sony boom box. In our eyes, his permission made him cooler than my other English teacher, who used to play Brahms at levels only Ultrasound could detect. The use of music and video is more suited to certain subjects, than to others, as reading and writing while listening to the Clash is easier than performing delicate lab experiments that, if overly influenced by Joe Strummer's ragged sneer, could end with frantic phone calls to the fire department.
My experience with computers in the classroom are more limited than I realized, since, when I obtained my undergraduate degree some eight years ago, nobody even had cellular phones, and laptops were the size of Vatican City. I can't even recall my professors using them, or even possessing them. We all used beige-colored desktops, and were well-pleased to skip class in the midst of a Spider-solitaire binge. Email was slow, and visually unpleasant, and ours was one of the first classes at the University of Iowa to participate in fully-online enrollment, sparing us the tedium of having to wait in line to sign-up for things like intramural bowling, and 'Health: The Changing Body and You.'
The most important thing this class has taught me is how likely out-of-touch I am with the technological fluency of today's teenagers. Marc Prensky, in his widely-cited book 'Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,' clearly delineates the starkness of contrast between us and them, but I'm sure I won't fully comprehend the divisions until presented with them. I don't want to be the teacher that only uses PowerPoint, and talks about the old days of 28.8 baud-rate modems and the bygone eras of writing papers long-hand, before committing them to incontrovertibly lame programs like Apple's 'I refuse to be compatible with any other software' ClarisWorks when I'm only thirty-two years young. Who am I kidding, I'm increasingly reliant on Icy Hot patches and Ibuprofen after riding on escalators.
Interestingly, ClarisWorks continued to be modified and released from its inception in 1991, to its eventual abandonment to desuetude in 2007, which seems a long time to continue to trot-out a program that should long ago been dragged rashly to pasture and riddled with bullets. I don't know how classrooms are using technology now, but I'm intrigued with what I've seen from SmartBoards, since I've seen them be more integrative and stimulating than technologies past, which, when the lights were dimmed, were more about allowing me to pass notes covertly to the weird art-chick with the purple Manic-Panic hairdo than waiting for the LaserDisc to fail due to a microscopic smudge. For the record, she never dated me, but she did get me into the Clash, so if I wind up teaching English lessons, I'm going to bring Mr. Strummer along for old-time's sake.
So maybe it's in the way it's presented that reaches people, not just the medium. Older technologies can be retro, rather than antiquated. Music, video and graphics are still the same basic message whether disseminated through a hand-held device, or off of LPs, in which teenagers are again becoming interested. Is the medium the message? I'm not sure, but I'm excited to find out.
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