There are many shifts that teachers are going to have to face in this new age of the Read/Write Web. Many will affect my classroom and my mindset about how I teach, but one is particularly important to the content I teach.
As a computer science teacher I teach different programming languages using different software and even various computer hardware. Each year I find myself faced with software upgrades that alter how students will be able to access their work or new security issues that force me to remove content taught in previous years, Java version upgrades that change the content of a course and even AP course requirements. Keeping up with the changes is a challenging process. But in the eyes of the old paradigm where textbooks are the backbone of a course, I find these changes pale in comparison with the challenge of finding/offering my students updated textbooks as primary resources. Textbooks in this area of study have a half-life of about six months and no reasonable school district will allow new textbook purchases every year.
The "big shift" that I am currently faced with is to create an open-source-type classroom in which everyone contributes to a dynamic curriculum that considers all the changes and relishes in the discovery of them. The core objectives will remain the same but as programming languages change and move to more Web-based tools themselves, my students and I can learn about them together. And as I am learning new collaborative tools this summer, I'm finding that this shift won't be as difficult as I might have initially thought. Whew.
1 comment:
Becky,
I hear a lot of teachers with the same concern. Without a doubt, I face it, too. No sooner do I have a course developed and the technology has changed. It's kind of like a very bad nightmare where I'm trying to find answers or save someone, etc, and no one will help me, and the help I do get leads me in the wrong direction!
I think with your own students, open source is a wonderful alternative. There is quite a bit of chatter and evidence that this works in education.
I also think this is much more authentic learning. Afterall, how would they solve this problem in a company? I think you hit it.
Lee Anne
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