Technology in education is, relatively, a young field. Euclid offered his landmark treatise
Elements on geometry around 300 B.C. making the formal study of that subject over two
thousand years old. Fifty years is the blink of an eye by comparison. However, we have
learned a few things. I think one of the significant things we have learned is that
technology is not a subject matter that is, to quote the government’s Goals 2000 agenda,
“bestowed on schools and classrooms from on high” but as a part of a systemic,
integrated education program. Therefore, I think to succinctly state my point, I would say
one lesson we have learned in the preceding fifty years is that technology is best
deployed integrated into instruction, rather than as a distinct subject.
In the reading assignment, the term “computer literacy” was used to describe technology
as a distinct subject taught in the classroom. Isolating the teaching of technology from
other subjects as either word processing skills or programming. By limiting the idea of
teaching technology in terms of base skills, it narrowed the application of this rapidly
evolving and mostly untapped resource. It is by employing technology in teaching what
the Goals 2000 legislation described as “authentic tasks” that it is best brought to bear on
learning and becomes integrated into, and part of an ever evolving learning environment.
Something necessary in an “infosphere” described in the T.H.E. Journal article
Computers in Education, a Brief History by A.J. Molnar, as growing exponentially.
By integrating technology into the learning of complex subject matter and tasks, the
importance of it is underscored while the student learns traditional subject matter, like
creating a business plan, completing a presentation for a speech class, or researching
DNA for a science fair project. Integrating technology into these lessons is simple. For
example; using a computer spread sheet for the business plan presentation, Powerpoint to
create a slide show adjunct for the speech, or using the internet to do the DNA research;
the technology integration can be made grade appropriate, and makes learning technology
part of the lesson without making it the lesson. The student learns the application of
technology, the how, as well as the what.
Marc Prensky’s concept of the “Digital Native” is on the money. Prensky’s examples
suport an integrated use of technology in education, as opposed to one which treats
technology as a separate and distinct field of study. Technology is not the lesson, it’s the
means of teaching the lesson more effectively. Today’s students don’t necessarily need us
to teach them the technology, they live it. They are digital natives. What they need is the
knowledge, the chemistry, biology, or mathematics, for example; and to understand how
to effectively obtain, manage, and process this knowledge using technology.
As an example, Scott Miles, a Boise State EdTech grad was teaching an introductory
class in commercial photography, and one of the first lessons was in using Powerpoint,
the Microsoft presentation application. The students were distinctly bored for the first
lesson. When Scott asked, the students said they all knew Powerpoint. A show of hands
demonstrated that yes, they all knew Powerpoint. He gave a quiz of sorts, then eliminated
that portion of the instruction from the syllabus. His students were digital natives. The
program he learned as part of a curriculum, theylearned as part of their ‘growing up’
experience as digital natives, much as we learn to look both ways to cross a street.