Theory is Nice, But Actual Practice is Better
I don’t really know what I was expecting when I got downtown last Wednesday, but whatever it was, the GVSU Teaching with Technology Fair (6th annual) surpassed it. I did think it’d be a bit bigger, and with all the content it could have been, but overall it was still semi-impressive.
As I rushed in, 15 minutes late, I didn’t miss a thing. The keynote speaker wasn’t even introduced yet, so I had a minute to take it in. The auditorium was sparsely seated which allowed me to pick out the professors I knew right away. But where were all the students? (For some reason I thought there would be more students; in retrospect I think it would be a great opportunity for those who are going in to the Education Field to take in. We’re all so fresh with ideas that maybe if we’re exposed to such things they’d be implemented in the classroom…successfully.) Before I had too much time to ponder this, Dr. Doolittle (love his name) was being introduced. His keynote address discussed the more psychological side of learning, which makes sense considering his field of expertise is in educational psychology. Dr. Doolittle’s explanations of cognitive psych, in my opinion, were a bit undermining. Nonetheless, when I thought about it, some of listeners probably didn’t know about top-down and bottom-up processing. Therefore, I took his activities with a grain of salt as I completed them for the millionth time. When time was up, I found it interesting to see that all of the middle-aged women surrounding me would rather talk to themselves than talk to me. (Apparently, they didn’t think my answers would be valid??) Luckily, I had Mike to discuss my answers with; unsurprisingly, we agreed on all of the issues presented. After playtime was over, Dr. Doolittle said a few thought-provoking things but the one idea that stuck with me was that we as a technological society “don’t need ‘the man’” anymore. We can publish things on the web without repercussions even if only for a little while. We as teachers need to recognize this and figure out how we can use this idea to help students learn.
The following break-out session presented by Dr. Doolittle “The iPodifaction of Education” was even less invigorating than his keynote address. After explaining, in great detail, features of an iPod (such as the movies it play, the songs it can play, etc) he finally got to the educational value of it. I was surprised to hear that so many universities were on the iTunes U. I can see great advantages of having entire lectures available online. (We actually listened to a bit of a lecture from Berkley.) However, on the downside, I can see this idea being abused almost instantly…. “Why go to class when the lecture is online?” But this did not bother me as much as the idea he presented for using the iPod in the English department. His example was to make discussion questions available on an iPod so that the students could record their answers instead of writing them down. Can we say….LAME?! Come on! No wonder why kids hate their English class! Instead of faking participation, why don’t people actually get the students engaged with what they’re reading. Maybe put an audio version of a Shakespeare play onto the iPod while students read along. I bet they’re understanding of it would skyrocket! If they didn’t understand something they could listen to HOW it is said or even rewind and listen again. But I digress. Overall, I think using technology that kids are already familiar with for teaching purposes is a wonderful idea. But as of right now I don’t see the iPod theory working out as well as Dr. Dolittle hopes it will.
The last breakout session I attended was “Digital Storytelling” and I’m sorry but this was by far the worst in my opinion. Not so much the idea, because frankly I’m in love with the idea, but the presentation. A dozen slides explaining the obvious benefits seemed redundant to me. What I was interested was how it worked, the software itself I mean. That was what I was interested in. I actually can’t wait to learn about it and hopefully use it in my classroom someday.
In between the breakout sessions I visited a former professor of mine who was presenting her latest project “Digital Fairytales in Italian”. Professoressa Licari taught me Italian for 2 years here at GV and I was so excited to see what she has been up to. When I was in her class, she emphasized using technology in all that we did. We used powerpoints (the effective kind) all the time, on top of recording ourselves speaking Italian, and watching Italian films to improve our language acquisition. This year she took it a step further and had her class create mini-movies. This was what I found to be the most interesting. ACTUALLY SEEING HOW TECHNOLOGY IS BEING USED. What a concept.
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