Unprepared for the Future

In the article Teaching and Learning with Social Media by Alice Daer and Liza Potts, it is discussed how social media can be a tool for teaching students. They give warnings about how to treat it and the use of it in the classroom while also defending the great benefits of it. This may sound like it's going to be a boring post, but I hope not. Because the article has taken me back to when I was still in high school.

Brace yourselves: we're having a flashback.

I was a junior when every student in my high school got an iPad; an iPad 2, to be exact. It was the coolest thing out there in 2011, ages ago in internet time. My friends and I felt like the bee's knees (did I really just use that simile?). I strutted around with my iPad and wasted no time becoming addicted to it.

The goal of the iPads was, the school's administration said, to improve learning and literacy of technology. Well, technology literacy certainly improved, both for the students and the staff, but I would not say learning. Our textbooks from then on were supposed to be available as ebooks. Uh, yeah no. Publishers were not prepared and did not have the formatting to convert all their textbooks into ebooks. The only etextbook I had my last two years of high school was a lone precalculus book. In reality, the iPads began to serve a different purpose: emailing and distraction. I passed AP Biology mainly because of Google. I tried the book, but it was like two encyclopedia's into one, and the worksheets spread out over several chapters. There was no point to spend hours upon hours scouring the book when I could look up twelve answers in one minute. I still learned, but in a different way. I got my homework finished amidst navigating Facebook and music/movie websites. It may be considered cheating, but if you give a teenager a computer that she can glue to her hand, don't expect her to ignore the easy access knowledge.

I'm not trying to have technology thrown out of classrooms--not at all. I love the class I'm in that I made this blog for; I love live-tweeting and reading my classmates' blogs. The big difference between my college experince with the latest technology and the internet and my high school experince is that by the time I entered college in 2012, most colleges were prepared for social media and the presence of the latest technology; publishers had figured out how to make and sell textbooks and ebooks.

I don't regret the experience with the iPad, but I think it's vitally important to be prepared for technology in the classroom. Daer and Potts speak specifically about social media, but I would have to write two more posts to cover what I have to say about that and I will not do that today. Anyways, technology, the lastest, that is, in classrooms because there is no doubt my friends and I became more internet literate through the use of the iPad--albeit while using it in ways we technically weren't supposed  to.