What the Dickens? The Best and Worst of Times

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A recurring motif to which I kept returning throughout this course and the other technology in education courses I have taken is “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times” from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.

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The Best of Times

I think that the tools at our disposal are breathtaking. We have seen tools that do everything from help us collaborate like twitter.com and tweetdeck.twitter.com to those who help us market and network ourselves and the amazing work we all do like blogger.com and wix.com.

We have learned the highly practical like how to use blogging and an assignment tracker as a way of tackling the very difficult task of organizing digital assignments that allow for both student choice and multiple genres of submissions in oversized classrooms. For that (and more) thank you to our teacher, Ms. Nicole M. Zumpano!

We learned about different web-based platforms like padlet.com and apagrapgh.com that help us to collaborate and make our work more engaging. We also learned through our reading and research why it is important to make our work more engaging.

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The Worst of Times

Ok…the entire “Digital Tattoo” experience was terrifying in its own way. Sort of like a colonoscopy, I see the value, understand the necessity, was pleased that the results were benign, but am not really in a hurry to repeat the experience.

So this leads me to the worst of the worst of times (worse than the colonoscopy?!?)… The fact that social media is all but banned between teachers and students in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is beyond frustrating. It is extremely difficult to learn of new, engaging approaches and then be barred (at the risk of losing one’s job) from using them. I understand the need for safety. As a father and as a teacher I understand the dangers inherent in potentially inappropriate communications between teachers and students’. But this course has also helped the potential educational danger to our students if we are not

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preparing them for the 21^st century, technology-driven world.

Now What?

I feel that the only thing that we can do is continue to increase our own understanding of the importance of technology in education so that we can not only educate our students but administrators and parents alike. We must be the vanguards. The task cannot fall to the textbook publishers or the politicians. We have seen the results of that.