Did you know?

One of the people that had a great impact on my development as a learner and a thinker was my grandfather. When I was growing up, he was constantly challenging all of his grandkids to be thinkers and one of his favorite ways to encourage us was through quotations. One of his favorite sayings was "Paper takes anything you print". The point of the quote is pretty simple and self explanatory - just because something is written down does not mean it is fact. The first thought that popped into my head at the conclusion of the "Did You Know?" slideshow was a twist to my pop's saying - "The internet takes anything you type." One of the most important and essential things that we can teach our children is to critically think about the information available on the internet. One must consider the source and credibility of info, the purpose behind the info, and the use of the info. The video on U-Tube was created by a for profit internet company and no sources were cited. Therefore, I do think it is quite a leap to just blindly assume that all the reported facts and statistics in the video are completely true and reported without bias. I think we as educators need to always have this in mind as we present lessons about the internet to our students. Like Friedman said, we need to teach them "to learn how to learn" and a big part of that puzzle is being informed and critical users of technology.

With the above said, I'm willing to make the jump and assume that the big picture of the "Did You Know?" video is true for the sake of this assignment. (Although I do have doubts about some of the facts - I'm just not up to checking them.) Friedman, Pink, and the creators of "Did You Know?" present information that points to a radically changing job force over the next few decades. They also suggest that American students need to develop a completely new skill set in order to find future success. The scariest thought is that these authors and researchers demonstrate that the current American school system is not providing the necessary skills to our students, nor is the system attempting to make the needed changes.

A lot of the information provided by Friedman and Pink rang true for me. In my school situation, we spend a lot of time with the students on basic skills and testing. Yet, our children are going to need technology, media, and information literacy skills in the future. My district just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to update the reading textbook series, yet the district is also considering eliminating the computer labs and technology teachers at the elementary level next school year. Budget cuts and testing requirements seem to change the nature of our job every year in negative ways. One example from my own classroom is that two years ago I did a really cool collaborative project with my Kindergarten students and their 6th grade buddies. Each Kindergartner created his/her own series of questions about an animal of interest, researched the questions in the library and computer lab with the help of their buddy, and then created a poster project that reported their findings and shared it with the entire class. Looking back on it, we were learning how to learn and this project could easily be tweaked to add a multimedia component to the project part. But, last year I cut this activity because it didn't connect directly to the curriculum and I was getting a lot of pressure to make sure my kids could add and subtract by the end of Kindergarten (not a required skill, but it is now standardize tested in grade 1). Lately, the American educational community (myself included) seems to be taking steps backwards out of fear, rather than bravely moving forward.

For me, one of the solutions to the issues stated by Pink, Friedman, and "Did You Know?" is for educators to keep on top of new developments in the field. I think that the best ways for teachers to do this is to read as much research as possible, take courses at legitimate teaching colleges and universities, and communicate with colleagues. These experiences allow us to grow and that process has a positive impact on what and how we teach our students. Administrators also need to make certain that this is a priority for them, as well as for the teachers that they supervise.

On a final note, I recognized the music that went with the "Did You Know?" video as coming from the Last of the Mohican's (a movie from about 10 years ago?) soundtrack. It's a nice instrumental CD and I play it in my classroom quite often. Anyway, the music got me thinking about the classic print version of Last of the Mohican's (written James Fenimore Cooper - I think he was a NJ native) versus the more contemporary and technology impressive movie version starring Daniel Day Lewis. For me, the book version is beautifully written and still engaging after all these years, while the movie version stinks. Did you know that sometimes new technology is not able to improve upon simple, classic perfection?