May
20
Disinterested 21st Century Students
May 20, 2009 | Tagged 21st century students, digital divide, digital immigrants, digital natives | Leave a Comment
Disengaged Students from jarrod robinson on Vimeo.
Tim Holt from El Paso ISD shared this video on Twitter today. Oh how I have seen this in so many classrooms over the last few years that I have been in education. It also reminded me of a situation that happened last week. Last week I asked a principal from one of our district campuses to talk about the upcoming Summer Technology Integration Program that I run during the summer. The reason I asked to speak to this campus was because I had only 3 teachers from that campus registered to attend the training while other campuses had about 10 -15 teachers registered. I wanted to promote the program and discuss some of the technology we would be covering and answer any questions they may have about the training.
I really wanted to know why this campus had so few teachers attending the training.
While speaking to the teachers and promoting the summer training I had one teacher who I had never met before asking a lot of questions at first which I liked because it made it that much easier to talk about the training. However, as I continued I realized that he really didnt have questions he was out to try and convince either the teachers at his campus or convince me that my summer program was a waste of time. I informed everyone there that the summer training did involve technology integration and that it was a little above just basics and that those teachers attending the training would have to have some basic knowledge of Microsoft Office and other technologies but it was not required; I would be there to assist them as much as possible.
This teacher continued to nitpick at the training and making comments here and there. I quickly found out that he wasnt really against the summer training when he made the comment (complaint) that the “technology department had taken his computer lab PCs away and given him new ones that were running Office 2007″ and that what used to “take him 5 minutes to do in Office 2003 now took him 25 minutes to do in Office 2007″. I was appauled that a Technology Teacher was complaining about getting new computers and that the new software installed on these new computers was too difficult to learn! So I calmly said “I find it very disturbing that a Technology Teacher is complaining about having new computers and having to learn new software. All this time I thought the problem was with our core teachers. I can clearly see that at this campus it is the person who is supposed to assist and inspire other teachers to use technology who has the problem. Maybe its time to look for another profession.” At that point about 85% of the teachers in the meeting clapped and cheered at what I had just stated.
This school is clearly stuck with a Mr. Mackey where the students have passed up the teacher. It made me wonder, how many other campuses and districts have other Mr. Mackey’s teaching our students?
