Dear Parents,
I am so glad you stopped by! I have been looking forward to creating a forum for more interaction between us, and I believe this may be it. For those of you who do not know, our Faculty Technology Commission has launched a campaign to increase the availability of technological learning on campus and to more actively integrate it into our students’ lives. I’m writing here to ask for your help.
Trust me, I know some of you have WoW addicts at home and I know from personal experience how frustrating that can be—that silly game cost my husband and I all kinds of hours that could have been spent together. But I also want you to understand how important technology can be for expanding learning opportunities for your children and preparing them for future careers. Just look at how quickly the internet has become integrated into local and global business? If we as your child’s teachers are not preparing them for a technologically interconnected world, we are not really teaching them at all.
When you and I were in school, we were mostly the beneficiaries of directed instruction. That is, our teachers emphasized behavioral and cognitive-behavioral theories like those of B. F. Skinner (remember him?) and Robert Gagne in order to impart knowledge to us in measurable, quantifiable ways. We had lectures and reading assignments and tests to find out whether we had mastered the material. More recently, teachers have been incorporating "constructivist approaches". These theories depend on the belief that people learn and demonstrate intelligence in different ways, or on observations about how child development effects learning. As it turns out, many theorists think that when we integrate technology and teaching, we tend to be using these “constructivist” theories and that these kinds of learning can dramatically improve critical thinking and problem solving skills.
As a Spanish teacher, I am really excited about the possibilities for your children in my classroom. For example, if I had a computer connected to the internet, a digital projection system, and a microphone/speaker system, I could have your students hear and speak Spanish with my Aunt and Uncle who live in Mazatlan, Mexico—in real time! And that wouldn’t just get your children to practice Spanish, it would show them how mastering the language could open up new life and travel opportunities they cannot imagine right now!
Simple lessons like these will allow your children to use multiple types of learning, visual and auditory, and it will engage other parts of their brain (like, for example, the future-projecting). They will become more interested in learning Spanish and they will become better at doing it!
But to make all this possible, we need YOUR help. That is why I am asking you as parents to join the FTC and the PTA in raising funds to make these dreams become a reality. Questions? Thoughts? Criticisms? Complaints? Just leave a comment below!
-Erin Bennett
Reference not listed by hyperlink:
Roblyer, Margaret, & Doering, Aaron. (2009). Integrating educational technology into teaching with myeducationlab. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2009.
