This post matches content that I wrote and posted for a conference that is happening this summer. You can see the original post on the Lake Michigan Tech Conference website here.
The world is rapidly evolving. Our economy is changing. We are preparing our students for jobs that do not yet exist. As educators, we need to find a way to stay relevant to our students and prepare them for a shifting world. Educational technology can play an important role in assisting us to figure this out, but it will never be the silver bullet that fixes it all.
Our students have also changed. This isn’t making an excuse for why our old techniques do not work as well as they used to, this is a reality. The use of educational technology in our classrooms can open up a world of opportunities for our students. No longer are they limited to the knowledge and experiences in our libraries and of our teachers. Using the internet and connecting with other sources of information can provide our students with the skills that they need to function in our modern economy.
With this connection, we must also begin to change the way that we are teaching our students. We have to find ways to connect to a new generation of learners who can find basic facts using good search terms. We have to appeal to their creative sides to have them build something. We need them to communicate their findings after completing research. We then need to challenge their findings to ensure that students have done the required critical thinking. Finally, we need to get the students to work with one another in meaningful ways. There are few jobs where an individual does not have to work with anyone else. We need to prep our students to be prepared for the world they are entering.
2 responses to “The Four Cs and the Need for EdTech”
“Nothing could be more absurd than an experiment in which computers are placed in a classroom where nothing else is changed.” – Seymour Papert (1994)
Each of the “C’s” you have mentioned is so much more about addressing how we teach, rather than the tools we teach with. Students DO change, individually and as a group. We can’t blame the students when our previous methods no longer produce the same results.
Exactly. It is time to adapt and ensure that we are truly working on how we teach to ensure that we are meeting the needs of the changing economy and our changing students.