Technology Integration is going to be one of the most controversial topics of the next generation in teaching. As our society changes to embrace technological advances we have to incorporate all of them into our classrooms so as to effectively prepare the students.
I think the most poignant example of this is how we are going to have to teach writing skills. In our lives we will most likely never write a paper for class on paper, most likely it will be on some form of word processor. Our old style of writing rough drafts and then re-writing a final is no longer relevent anymore, but the same type of editing is required. Editing on a word processor is many times easier then by hand. Just during the typing of this post I've moved around sentenses, inserted a new paragraph, changed the wording to avoid repeating the same phrase and done all the other things that you do changing from a rough to final draft. We need to teach our kids how to do things that are important with the same tools that they will have at their disposal and not the ones from generations ago.
In addition cursive spellling will not come up, ever, in a ten year olds life. On the other hand that ten year old would greatly benefit from skipping cursive and using that time to learn how to touch type on a computer. Cursive was designed to be a form of writing that was faster and more acceptable for official documentation. That was before computers. I now type at around sixty words per min, much much faster than I can write. Plus typing has become the offical form of documentation, not cursive. This is another way in which we can intergrate technology into our classrooms.
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I agree completely with your comments on cursive. I remember sitting in middle school and hearing teachers say "when you get to high school, you will be required to write in cursive". As soon as I got to high school, though, everything was required to be typed.
ReplyDeleteI think that a combination of skills can be used when teaching a student to edit a writing piece. For example, with many of my students I have them type a lab report and then print out a copy and make changes and corrections to the copy by hand. Then they use their typed copy with the handwritten corrections to fix or change the saved version on the computer. Editing and revising skills are the important skills we should be teaching, regardless of whether a student is handwriting, typing, dictating, or "wirelessly" sending their thoughts to a commputer in the future.