Technological Integration into the Classroom

For me as a person who really wants to make science accessible and understandable for my students, this week’s reading for my education technologies class simply excites me. I’ve always kind of had this vision of the dusty old teacher pulling out models and animals preserved in jars and stuff for biology class… but the idea of collecting and analysis of bioinformatics with my students is… well… wow! As an example, if I wanted to introduce some students to statistical principles, environmental concerns, diversity of life, and something like insect life cycles all at the same time… well it’s not hard. All I would have to do is get them involved in a project such as the “Monarch monitoring”. This program will send a teacher anywhere in Canada, the United States, or Mexico a bag full of Polyethylene tags and instructions on how to tag Monarch butterflies. I can then take the kids out teach them how to tag the Monarchs and apply the aspects of the Alberta curriculum into the exercise. The students can then look at data collected online from other learning centers and look at data from other years. Then I would show the students something amazing: Oecologia, Volume 125, Number 2, October 2000, pages 241-248… this little article uses data collected by scientists at Iowa State University on the effects of BT transgenic corn pollen and its lethal effects on Monarch Butterflies. This would allow the students to realize that they have done something worth while, and perhaps they would take a vested interest in this project and do some follow-up by themselves… this would be the start of inquiry, the very life-blood of science, it would also lead students down a road of life-long learning, and all from about 15 minutes of looking in the right places.

This story is not all rosy though… the absolute crush of information un-cited, cross-referenced, jargon filled, full of inaccuracies, holding values that are not appropriate… all these things need to be sorted by the teacher and the students need to be guided through them. It would be almost completely useless to simply turn a group of students ‘loose’ upon the internet to gather some information or reference material. Maybe some of them would learn something… but frankly, I don’t think there are many adults out there that know all the pitfalls of the internet. Furthermore, there are some things that a computer can never do for a student. For example students can learn all about the inner workings of a frog, but a real dissection still imparts a certain humility, and humbleness that only a small dead creature can contain.

There are still barriers that hamper the full use of technology in the classroom. The digital world demands it’s own set of problem solving techniques; techniques that a teacher would have to learn, and then impart upon his or her students. Another barrier is the sheer amount of information that is to be sorted is unimaginable. There is no way that any teacher can know about every educational tool out there. A third barrier is the rapid societal changes that the internet brings, for example ‘second life’, ‘facebook’, and ‘youtube’, are changing the way that students are looking at the world one video clip, one download, and one minute at a time. The social and cultural impacts of these technologies are not yet even fully understood by academia. These are but a few technological and societal barriers to overcome… there will be others of course, budgetary concerns and such will also prove difficult at times. But as teachers of a new generation I feel confident taking on these challenges. Q