Phase 3 - Standard 3

Standard 3: Model Digital-Age Work and Learning

An article entitled, “Education needs a digital-update,” by Virginia Hefferman from the NY Times Opinion Page on Aug. 7, 2011, includes an interesting statistic.  Hefferman states that 65% of students now entering elementary school will be doing work as adults that does not exist yet.  This means that we as teachers can not prepare students by giving them a specific set of skills that would be applicable to jobs as they exist today.  To me it seems to be more advantageous to equip students with the ability to be flexible and innovative, and to help them become as comfortable with digital work and technology as possible.  As students become competent in working with many forms of technology now, they will be more confident in their ability to keep adapting to changing technology in the future. 

As I talked about in my post on Standards 1 and 2, many forms of technology used in education today promote individuality and creativity.  Students are able to demonstrate their knowledge in many forms, according to their own interests.  I think that students who are given the freedom to learn in a variety of ways may grow up to be aware of their own strengths, and at ease being unique.  It seems to me that this can only help them as they adapt to an unknown future that will certainly include forms of technology we can not imagine today. 

I think a good way to model digital-age work and learning would be to help students understand how technology helps me in my own job as their teacher.  As I mentioned previously, I hope to involve students in a classroom blog that helps keep parents and administrators updated.  This would be a realistic and valuable learning experience that has real-world applications.  I also think it would be worthwhile to expose students to professionals in other fields who use various forms of technology in their jobs.  I could do this through field trips, by having guest speakers in the classroom, or using Skype, or by watching Youtube videos or other internet resources. 

Finally, to effectively model digital-age work and learning, I will need to be current in my own knowledge of available technology.  This semester I realized how much I had yet to learn in this area.  I now feel better prepared to use technology in my classroom, but because technology is continually changing, I will need to find ways to keep up with the changes.