"Did you Know?"

My initial reaction to this piece on "You Tube" was a mixture of, "Wow! That's amazing" and "Wow! What happened to physical human connection"? I'm kind of a conflicted character when it comes to technology and its awe inspiring advancements. On one hand, I love it and am its personal slave, but on the other, I am the kind of girl who still yearns for hand written letters of years gone by. When I think of how amazing it was to hold in my hands the letters my grandfather had written to my grandmother during World War II, I can't imagine how emails, spit out from a laser printer, will hold the same intimate value for my grandchildren. In fact, I'm pretty sure the art of the love letter is slowly becoming an artifact thanks to the advent of email. Maybe they still come in the form of a love text(2,272 of them a month in the teenage cell phone) or a love tweet, but I just can't buy into the idea that the same level of excitement that my grandmother felt when heading to her mailbox exists when kids flip on their blackberry screens. I guess I'm just being old fashioned. I bet the US Postal service wishes that technology would just disappear. Maybe, they're yearning even more for the past, sans my nostalgia. http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/02/news/economy/usps/

After I got over my initial yearning for days gone by, it became glaringly obvious to me that things have to change for our schools or in a decade or so, we, too, will be obsolete. This was also reinforced by Pink and Friedman, and it left me a little frightened yet exhilarated. Our students are the products of a different era. Some of their skills in the technological arts far surpass ours, and I think the role of student and teacher is rapidly changing. Many teachers may have said that they liked to believe they were able to learn as much from their students as their students learned from them. For the first time in history, this is an undeniable truth, and anyone who isn't willing to face that truth should probably be scared. Kids are empowered with tools that we never had access to. The face of research has changed, and on one hand we think they are spoiled to have Google at their fingertips, but it is a double edged sword that presents challenges that you and I never had to think of. Those trusty books in the library were tried and true. Their validity was hard to dispute. Our kids are forced to be educated consumers of information at a much earlier age, and my main concern is are they ready for this responsibility? My next concern is are we ready to teach them how to really research in this new era? We can't speed up their physical development to tell the difference between truth and pure false. But do we have time for wisdom to mature?

When I look at the things we are teaching children, we are spending time teaching them things that were outdated twenty years ago. Are we holding on to those "saber tooth traditions" for our own sake of nostalgia at their expense? Let's be honest, I love teaching my kids how to construct newspaper articles and how to lay them out, but if I'm being serious with myself, I know that the newspaper is a dying form of artistry. If I wanted to teach them a skill that they could pursue, I would be asking them to become blogger journalists. It's time to chuck the chart paper and glue sticks and get them hooked up to the World Wide Web. Even with that sense of clarity, I think to myself, what a shame they'll never know what it was like to have black smudge on their fingers (and I'm not even being sarcastic).

Our students need the skills of adaptation. Without them, they will lead a life of professional disaster. It's not that much different from our personal lives. If we do not learn how to roll with the punches and adapt our skill sets to those around us, our relationships are in ruins. Technology poses that same threat to our students. They must become experts at the very things whose days are numbered, and then they will have to learn how to be experts at the next wave of technological inventions. We can model these behaviors with our teaching. Gone are the days of yellowed, dog eared lesson plans. We must lead by example and be the masters of adaptation and innovation if we are going to keep up with the times and the new skills we need to be teaching our students. It's not a choice; it's a responsibility, and if we are worth our salt as educators, we will accept these changes without making a fuss.

When I saw the question, "who's scared?", I thought, who's not scared? I'm horrified that many of us( 2 million) are watching television in the bathroom! With a sense of seriousness, change stirs horror in so many, and maybe that's human. That being said, it is true that there's nothing to fear but fear itself. You can be scared for a few short seconds, but then, you need to channel that fear into positive energy that aims for change. Some of our colleagues will refuse to jump on our train, but we'll have to throw them life preservers and help them out. If we stand by and watch them drown, then we are just as responsible for their metaphorical deaths as they are. Perhaps, we will not be popular when we rock the boat and promote change, but that's part of life. The greatest changers in the history of the Earth have rarely been the most popular set of people.

One of the questions that really made me think was the question of whether a teacher could truly be great without the use of technology. I will emphatically say yes because I have seen it done in my educational journey. Some of the most inspiring teachers I have ever had never used a power point presentation let alone YouTube. They inspired me to think, to feel, and to be genuinely human. They left me yearning to know more, and one of them left me yearning to be a teacher and her highest form of technology was an overhead projector. These teachers taught me how to "really connect" and that is the one thing I fear technology does not teach. In fact, it teaches the direct opposite of that. It teaches us how to put barriers between authentic human connection, but with a little finesse, the best educators will overcome that, as well.