I am taking bigger steps into the ICT world, with that there are and will be many challenges. Thanks to Jenny for expanding upon some of the resistances I have witnessed in schools. I am more prepared for the educators who are “blindspotted” and “blindsighted”. As always Jenny concludes with a hopeful message, that is individually we do want good for all. Educators just have many varying ways of achieving it. Experienced teachers do not bulk at the idea of supplementing their lessons with technology because they don’t want to help their students. They are resistant because they are worried that ICT will come to a dead end. The leading ICT teachers will not let this happen, as long as more teachers become ICT advocates as well. There are many experienced teachers who are phenomenal! They have a passion for teaching, and they do it well. Of course they are going to be resistant to someone saying that a little piece of technology will do a better job than they could.
Some of the challenges that I can for see with my project is that I am trying to mix two things that a lot of teachers wouldn’t normally associate with each other, the environment and technology. Teachers who are interested in environmental education will be orientated or directed to my website by connections in my school or tweets. They may realize that it also involves using technology and turn the other directions. The divide between the “subjects” of environmental education and technology has to be shattered. Who said these subjects have to separated into their own tidy little box, and only taught for one hour at a time?
Positive conversations online or face to face will begin the process of fostering resilience in any school. The lines of communication with like minded people have to remain open. On my website these conversations will happen online through blogs. Teachers who are environment education advocates and ICT supporters will have a place to stand guard over what they are passionate about. Problems or annoyances may be brought to the blog, but alternate solutions can be suggested by a group of people. Two heads are better than one!
A great insight into why teachers might baulk at using technology when they have years in the field and have great success teaching their students: it seems ridiculous that the use of technology could change the quality of their teaching to any significant degree, especially when the effort to actually put the technology to use is taken into consideration. It is interesting that there would be a technological divide in environmental education. After all, the only reason we know what we know about the environment, habitats and ecological systems is through our uses of measurement technology to gain understanding of living systems. I was thinking today how the sum of our efforts working together will always exceed what we can do working individually. Can you imagine the kind of environmental studies we could be undertaking with our school-age children? We could have an entire generation of environmental scientists blossoming under our guidance! Nice work, Tess.