Talking About Technology to Teacher-Candidates in the SOE at Pace

This week I did a 30 minutes presentation in one of my Professor's classes in the SOE at Pace University. Professor Kathryn De Lawter, an Assistant Professor in the SOE at Pace has been using Ipads in her educational pedagogy class via a Verizon grant and I came into her class, at her request, to talk to future teachers about learning and technology. I started with some anecdotal stories from my own family, kids and students I work with and talked about how I have watched technology push individuals to learn in new ways. I introduced some great sites like: comiclife, wordle, glogster, xtranormal, dipity and more to get them to see that students want to be engaged and want to create. I told them to join twitter---only one student out of 30 was on twitter because it is the best Personal Learning Network out there.

There was one student in particular who really despised the idea of using technology. She called me out when I used terms like--"this program is really easy--it's just drag and drop" and said--why is drag and drop important for students to learn? What does it teach them? I love a good challenge and what ensued was a heated discussion around her views as an anti-technology person and mine as a technology educator. In the end, I'm not sure I convinced her to even try using anything technology-related in the classroom. What made me ultimately sad was that she is an example of so many of the teachers out there who basically are not--going with the flow in contemporary society. Change is good--and for an educator to be completed closed off to change is quite unfortunate. How do we get teachers to try using technology in the classroom? I haven't figured this one out yet--but, I know that my own passion for technology will remain and grow.