- Deviant art, https://au.pinterest.com/pin/421157002632323763/
It’s now my second and final semester of my Graduate Diploma of Secondary Education at Curtin University and I’ve been given the opportunity to blog as part of my online paper entitled ‘Technologies to Engage Learners’. This is great news for my blog, as it is guaranteed to have updates throughout the semester. It’s also exactly the motivation that I need to put some regularity into reflection on my learning and teaching through my blog, and hopefully I will get some momentum to make this regular throughout my secondary teaching career. In this way, I hope to become a reflective teacher, (as discussed in a previous post on that topic).
The series of blog posts that I will be writing are as follows:
- What is a digital world? (This one)
- Participation and the digital divide
- Lifelong learning in the digital age
- Evaluating technologies and online resources
- Digital issues and the nature of schooling in the digital age
So, without further ado, what is a digital world and what does that mean for education now and throughout the rest of my career? The first point here is that technology has become an integral part of many aspects of our lives and the lives of younger generations to an even greater extent. Admittedly, as I’m writing this, my toddler is in front of me dancing to the music of the Wiggles that he is watching on the Ipad, which seems to have become his own. Howell (2012) highlights the way in which the digital world has penetrated young people’s private, social and work lives, (the issue of the ‘digital divide’ meaning that this digital access is not universal will be examined in my next post). She refers to today’s learners as digital natives (Prensky as cited in Howell 2012) having been exposed to technology from a very young age, explaining that such upbringings leave young people digitally expectant. When it is no longer unusual for two-year-olds to use basic functions of touch screens, it becomes evident that we have a generation who will not remember having learnt how to use this technology. It will, therefore, be as natural for them to use such technology as it is to use a spoon. In their tweens and teens, this generation is constantly online: browsing, chatting and social networking, downloading and streaming music and movies (ABS, 2011). With increased accessibility to internet via mobile phones, apps for anything you can think of and the increased sophistication of augmented reality facilitating games such as Pokemon Go, technology will undoubtedly be increasingly coming into classrooms rather than going away.
The implications of these technologies on teaching will be examined in more detail in future posts, but the bottom line is that teachers are the ones that will need to adapt to the digital expectancy of their students if they have any hope of engaging them. Considering that the average age of Australian secondary teachers is 43.7 (ABS, 2011), the majority fall under Prensky’s definition of digital immigrants (as cited in Killen, 2013, p. 35), and may struggle with learning technologies without specific and ongoing training, as well as easily accessible tech support. Although some of these issues will eventually resolve themselves as younger digitally native teachers are trained and older generations retire, the issue of teachers’ digital illiteracy urgently needs to be dealt with in the interests of current secondary students to keep older teachers’ classes relevant.
References
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2011, June 11). 4102.0 – Australian Social Trends, Jun 2011 . Retrieved from Australian Bureau of Statistics: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/4221.0Main%20Features402015?opendocument&tabname=Summary&prodno=4221.0&issue=2015&num=&view=
Howell, J. (2012). Teaching with ICT: Digital Pedagogies for Collaboration and Creativity. Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press.
Killen, R. (2013). Effective Teaching Strategies: Lessons from Research and Practice (6th ed.). Melbourne: Cengage Learning Australia.
ESL Teaching Tales 