Herding Cats

One of the students in my professional development class recently shared her frustration of her school district’s policy that not only blocks online videos but also purposely neglects to install sound capabilities in their school’s computers.

The question we need to ask is, Are these technologies blocked for the students' benefit, or for our convenience? In 2001, education technology visioneer Marc Prensky labeled students as "Digital Natives" and those of us who are older than 25 or so as "Digital Immigrants". Teenagers ubiquitously navigate through audio, video, IM, text messaging and many other forms of digital communication on a daily basis. Just because we "Digital Immigrants" don't understand, does that make it useless? or bad?

A study published in August, 2007 by the National School Boards Association found that 96% of students with online access use social-networking technologies. No one taught them how to use MySpace--they learned from each other. Big surprise that many use it inappropriately! There are some obvious parallels we could draw here.

School administrators keep asking me how their schools can use electronic portfolios, and they are surprised when I tell them that their students already are--it's the teachers who need to learn how to do it. Some school districts, like Seattle Public Schools, are proactive, purchasing services such as Medley and providing the requisite training for teachers and staff--as well as instruction for students regarding media literacy, evaluating sources, and other 21st Century Learning Skills.

IMHO we need to accept that our teenagers probably know a lot more than we do about many of these technologies. However, we tend to have a couple things they don't have: experience and judgment. Together, these provide us with the ability to make predictions regarding the potential results of our actions. Students, as the ultimate optimists, rarely think what they do is going to injure them. The side benefit of this optimism is the willingness to learn and try new things. Isn't this the attitude we want to promote in our students? IMHO we as educators spend all too much time and effort in an attempt to control something we don't know about, understand, and are afraid of. And in the end, it's like herding cats. Maybe if we walked among them, we could lead them in a direction that's more appropriate.