Sometimes it just doesn't feel like there is much to write about, but it has been six days since my last post so here goes.We are two weeks from Tech Tuesday. It's the day the middle school will pilot our first BYOD Day (Bring Your Own Device) for the entire school district. Many teachers are apprehensive about how to incorporate BYOD into their lessons. I am choosing to live in a pleasant world of denial about it. I guess I do have a bit of a "been there, done that" attitude about it because I have been encouraging my college students to use their devices in class every summer for years now.
How does a literacy educator incorporate technology into an every day lesson? Take the box, turn it inside/out and step out of it. Huh? Well, students are always grumbling about dictionaries, thesuari, and other reference tools they have to use in class. Let them put their money where their whine is. If they believe that they can find the same quality information from a website that they can find in their textbook, dictionary, and thesaurus, let them.
When you think about it, the same discriminatory thinking required to find contextual definitions, true synonyms and discreet information is also going to come into play when students use the internet to find information. Students know how to cut and paste information from sites but they often don't take the time to read through the information to make certain it is the correct fit. The frustration that comes along the adventure to discovery learning teaches the same lessons as the books do.
On BYOD Day, my students will be well into their writing process for their first formal essay of the year. Students who did BYOD will be able to look up misspelled words online, find better word choice suggestions online, post questions to my wallwisher.com site, draft their first draft online and upload their work to me through edmodo.com
My thought about BYOD is simple: how can students use their own technology to enhance their educational process in my class. I see no value in making this day a Dog and Pony show. For me, the only change has been a paradigm shift from seeing technology as cheating to seeing the use of technology as an enhancment.
To enhance this blog, I used Shopenhauer's quote. It was an advantage to grow up the son of a multipatented electrical engineer, a television designer. I learned quite a bit about degrees of improbability. Dad said that reason it took so long to go from picture tube based units to flat screen tvs was that the computers were not strong enough to calculate the math needed to get LEDs to work like pixels. He went on to say that some even thought it was impossible to get a flat screen to work because of the computer limitations. 20 years later, most households have some sort of flat screen devise, whether it's their child's PS2 gaming device, a smart phone, a flat screen tv, or a tablet. Flat screen technology is a ubiquitous fact of our lives now. Dad used to say that nothing is impossible but there are varying degrees of improbability. That is to say nothing is impossible but somethings are inplausible-- at this point in time. We need to inspire our students to seek out the next best thing and lead the way to it.
