Why is it important to change our teaching style?

With an increasing emphasis on standardized testing and an need to cover more and more content how can we meet this challenge and serve our students in the best possible way? We live in a society where information is EASY to find. The problem is that we have too much information and we need to know how to filter it for relevance and value to us. Our students use technology daily from their computer games, cell phones, DVD players, MP3 audio players to instant messaging and chat rooms. Kids find these tools vital to their communication.

When I was a teen I was an amateur radio operator (WA6TKC) and often stayed up late at night to make contact with other hams in other countries. There was a thrill in knowing that I had made contact with others and had a QSL Card or postcard to show it. My wall was full of hundreds of them. I loved it. But, it was all using Morse Code which was slow and our conversations were not very deep. I got a chance to help send important messages to Alaska in 1962 during the earthquake there. It made me feel important.

This same thrill is there for our students only it is much better than it was for me. With the internet they can actually share information with people all over the world. I taught photography for 28 years before moving into Technology Coordination for our school district. For years I tried to get my students to make a good critique of a photograph and got deep answers like " I like it" or It's cool". Then I put their photographs into a gallery where they had to compete in class to get only the best shot from the 120 students to show. Those in the gallery had people make comments about them. Kids were excited. I could hardly hold them down. Now they were telling me about the photographs center of interest and how the photographer used composition to make the photo exciting.

We can still expose kids to the same content and standards we used when I taught before but now we can add a technology component where they can share their work with people all over the world. The feed back they get will feed their desire for more. Now our problem will be keeping the from doing too much rather than trying to keep them awake.