TUFSD Blogs

By J. Calvert

Teachers are not strangers to change, although in recent years our noble profession has tasted an unprecedented escalation of change. Our district is not alone; teachers everywhere say the same thing. The reality is, the rate of change is increasing for everyone. It is present in teaching as much as it is present in law enforcement, auto mechanics, or any other profession. It has been spurred forward by our increasingly connected world and the technologies that enable it. This is a bit overwhelming, especially when you consider that our current rate of change will be considered staid compared to what our students will experience.

Vygotsky wisely told us that a society is defined by the tools it uses. Indeed, new tools are responsible for the incredible shifts we are witnessing. Time magazine recognized this when it announced that the “Person of the Year” was us. The video sharing website YouTube, the social networking website MySpace, and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, all have something in common: the masses create the content. Regular people share their knowledge with other regular people. It is a simple paradigm, but when it is applied on a global scale the traditional avenues of information dissmination, such as newspapers and television, are supplanted. The “old media” outlets are painfully aware of this shift, as was reported on January 1^st of this year by The News Hour.

The repercussions have been huge. When the now famous “Mukaka” incident was published on YouTube, it cost George Allen a Senate seat. Wikipedia was the first encyclopedia world wide, online or in print, to reflect that Pluto was no longer a planet. I watched Saddam Hussein hang on YouTube, the very night the execution took place. However, the footage I saw on my laptop was different than what was shown on TV. The YouTube clip was captured by an Iraqi on his cell phone and then posted to the online site. The YouTube footage included the sectarian chants and audible chaos of the moment which belied the somber justice that the mass media was initially presenting to the public.

As we prepare to write our five-year technology plan, we must consider these changes. Knowledge is everywhere in our net enabled world.  It will be important for our students to know how to find what they need and digest it efficiently. This ubiquity of information will also assist teachers, as quality news programs like Nova, Frontline, and the News Hour, publish their content to the internet. Even MIT is participating in this shift. MIT’s OpenCourseWare website offers 1,600 courses for free to the public. These materials can be harnessed to augment classroom instruction, and in many cases, put the emphasis on student directed learning. Powerful tools are already changing our society, the trick for our committee will be to uncover how they can also meaningfully change education.