I had the great pleasure of attending NCCE last week in Seattle. I got a lot out of attending and found it inspiring. It’s also a little overwhelming. There are so many resources available now. My field of instructional technology is overwhelming enough. I feel a bit of a responsibility to be familiar with everything out there related to my field. Honestly, there is too much being created and becoming obsolete all the time for any one person to know all that is out there. I’ve known this for awhile, and I try to compensate by following technology news sources and educators so I can be on top of the field as much as possible, and so I know where to go to find out more whenever I need to.
My field’s pretty easy, though, compared to that of anyone in content. The days when the teacher was the gateway to knowledge are so long gone. Know it, accept it, and embrace it, teachers. Your students can hear straight from an astronomer about a discovery of a new star. They can read an original historical document. They can have a conversation with the president of another country. They can ask a professional mathematician about the practical applications of last night’s homework assignment. And they can do this without you ever knowing. You can’t stop it. It’s already happened. It’s happening now.
I was in a presentation where we were shown Wolfram Alpha doing math. If someone wants you to find x^2 sin(x) (whatever that is), type it into Wolfram Alpha and get all the data you could ever want and more. Every homework assignment I was ever given in math class can be done by simply typing it into Wolfram Alpha. Hmmm.
Know it. Accept it. Embrace it.
How cool! Math teachers, tell me you didn’t become a math teacher just to show kids how to follow the steps to answer a math problem the same way everybody else in the world was taught to solve it. What inspired you to become a math teacher? Now that Wolfram Alpha can do the basic stuff, can you do even more? If your students can find the answers there, can you teach them why the answers are worth finding?
Another presentation focused more on literature and history. There was a book about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. I don’t think I had ever heard about it before, but I learned it was pretty significant in women’s lib and labor laws. The presenter showed us so many resources available on this. If kids know how to search, they can find images, videos about it, interviews, building plans, and so much more. That’s just one little fragment of a content area. There is no way a teacher could be familiar with all of the resources available on that one event, much less the rest of topics in the curriculum, much less everything else that is relevant to the curriculum that didn’t fit into the plan for the year.
Not only was it the last presentation of the conference, but the sea of information that was available was so vast, I could see teachers thinking, “How can I possibly know all of this?” Does it help to think, “I can’t.” There is more information available in every subject area now, and more becoming available all the time, that no one can have a complete list. It’s impossible. Your students are going to find sources you have never seen before. Know that. Accept that. Embrace it. If your kids aren’t inspired to find things you have never seen before, are you teaching it well enough?
This is a big, stressful change. I hope you’ve made it already. If you haven’t, accept that you can’t stop it. There’s no going back. Even if all the access is shut down in a school, kids can get to all of this outside of school. The time when the school was the gateway to information is gone. Long gone. And that’s really pretty awesome. Help your kids find all of this, analyze it and evaluate it, and then teach them the inspiring things you never had time to teach before.
