18 April: Lessons Learned

I learned that technology is growing rapidly. In the video “Did You Know” it said that technology completely changes every 2 years; that means that what I am learning technology wise during my freshman year of college will be completely outdated by my sophomore year. That is crazy and somewhat scary to me. I learned that as a teacher I need to keep up on my technology knowledge. That same video stated that because technology is changing so rapidly, our jobs are changing just as rapidly. This means that we are preparing our students for jobs that do not even exist yet. At this day and age our students will not be able to succeed in the professional world without having well developed skills in technology. As educators it is our jobs to teach our students our content areas (history for me) but also to teach them skills they need to be able to function in society.

I also learned that there is a large disconnect between what our students know and what their parents know. If we believe that our students parents will teach them the skills they need in technology we are severely mistaken. At this point most of our students will be able to do more when it comes to technology then their parents and actually have to help their parents do things. I believe that this has to do with me as well, my family came into technology late and because of that I find I am technologically behind all my siblings. I will have to continually keep learning to keep up with my students so that they do not pass me up in what I know about technology.

I learned that the top 25% of China’s educated population is larger than the entire population of the United States. India’s top 28% of their educated population is larger than the entire population of the United States. In teachers terms that means they have more honor students than we have students. This blows me away. I feel that the U.S. has technology but we take it for granted. Again this is where I believe we need to teach our students skills to advance in the world we live in know (but that is for another blog post). I also learned by watching the Millennial Generation that most students want technology to advance even more. They want to be able to do everything and I mean music, movies, T.V., internet, reading, homework, etc. Wirelessly and on a small hand held device. I believe that we will continue to move that way in this country with our technological advances.