A common thing I hear in regards to technology and our understanding of it goes along the lines of, “Kids are amazing…we can just learn it from them!”
Although I really believe in the power of learning with our students and that in the area of technology, I wonder sometimes if we use that thinking as an excuse to get out of learning.
Let me explain…
The ability for us to connect and learn from a vast amount of information in a highly networked world is daunting for most, including our students. Navigating some of these murky waters, can be extremely complicated. Because of that, I think this is all the more reason that we have to jump in ourselves and learn so we can help guide our students through these networks. SImply saying, “I am going to learn from our kids”, leaves us often waiting for those moments and we could possibly miss out on many opportunities that we could have created for our students. Sometimes we “don’t know what we don’t know”, and when we wait for our students to “teach us”, we might miss out on what we can show them as well.
Do I think that we can learn from kids? Absolutely. I highly encourage it as it empowers our students to act as both teachers and learners.
Is it possible for us to know about all of the technology out there? Not a chance. Even the most tech savvy educators in the world will not know every facet of technology. There is just too much stuff.
But for us to simply wait for our kids to teach us, we could miss so many amazing opportunities that we could have helped create in our school if we would have jumped into those waters on our own first.
