Chapter 10: What It All Means

Chapter 10 is the chapter that combines all the chapters together.  We have read about all this different types and kinds of technology.  Now it is up to us as future educators how we are going to decide what to do with the information.  We know that students and the education system is changing vastly around us.  We have many different tools available for us that were not available twenty years ago.  We now must decide what tools we want to incorporate into our classroom and what we want to leave behind.  This chapter also talks about the different shifts taking place in the new age of technology.  

With the internet content is being opened up to the general public.  Schools are no longer required to buy all the resources needed to teach the youth.  Students spent a large amount of time researching to learn.  Now Information is right at our fingertips.  It only takes a google search to find new information.  Learning is also taking place 24/7 in compared to past times when students came to school to study and then went home and forgot about learning.  With computers students can learn half way around the world and still not fall far behind.  Learning is switching from lecture to different forms of conversation.  It is outdated to just stand in front of a classroom and tell the students what they should know. Instead students need to find meaning in the information placed in front of them.  Students need to know why must we learn this and what is the benefit for me as a student.

One of my favorite shifts taking place is "Mastery is the Product, not a test.  In the past if you passed a test with a 70% or greater you were able say you mastered the material. No one took the next step and tried to see how you could apply the information to the real world.  In fact teachers assumed that if you passed the test you should have been alright applying the information in real life.  Students are no longer being tested on the material in Test format. They are being asked to apply the information they learned in different new ways.  These ways are more applicable to real life.  I believe that when students feel that they need to learn this information because it is beneficial to success in later years they are more motivated to learn the information.

The last chapter of the book talks about all these shifts taking place in the world.  This is only the beginning of a new format of teaching.  The book has showed us the vastly different options we have to incorporate in our classroom.  However because this huge shift is coming it is very important that we take the information and run with it.  Because if we don't, we might get swept away in the flood of technology.