Okay, I have to say my head hurts. There's no room for playing with this issue. While I'm having a great time exploring the basic workings and uses of blogs, twitter and photosharing, I've run smack into the mountain of chaos that is Ontario's backward school boards, unions, conservative parent groups and I must say, a huge number of teachers. I understand that we're behind. I understand that some are scared. What I really don't understand is the outright hostility towards technology and in the letter cited below, towards students.
Earlier this week, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, (Way to go Dalton!") made the following statement in the legislature on the use of cell phones in school:
September 16, 2010 - “First of all, texting or the use of cell phones to socialize during class is a distraction and it does not belong in a classroom, period. Secondly, Speaker, we trust teachers and boards and parents to make the right call when it comes to ever changing technologies. If those technologies can help our students learn, that is a good thing. If they don't, if they are a distraction, then they should not be in the classroom. Simple as that." http://www.premier.gov.on.ca/home/index.php
His comments were expanded on in this article which was printed in several Toronto papers.
What has followed is an outpouring of comments ridiculing the premier and definitely anti-technology. What has my head hurting is the thinking found in letters to the editor like the one below.
"I am a high school teacher and I am absolutely perplexed that Dalton McGuinty has come out in support of students using cellphones in the classroom (“Talkin’ in the classroom,” Antonella Artuso, Sept. 16). Barely 10 days into the school year, and days after holding our “rules and expectations” assembly (ie., no cellphones or electronic devices to be used in class), students are now getting a mixed message. Have we reached the point of giving in to the whims of students who cannot bear to be without their phone during the school day? And what would we be teaching them by changing the rules mid-stream? If a student has a cellphone, it has a camera. I will not teach in a class if I know a student could take my picture. It may end up on the Internet. This idea has privacy and legal problems written all over it. If the “education premier” was truly concerned with literacy and graduation rates, and cared about helping students focus on learning and not distractions, he would never have considered this ridiculous idea. Students have many hours before and after school to do “research” (really, Dalton — research?) on their cellphones. This is an ill-informed, nonsensical idea.
Has it ever dawned on people that one of the reasons students are disengaged is because school does not even remotely resemble their world. I can almost understand the fear of technology, but it doesn't sound like this teacher even likes her students very much. The response to Dalton's comments have shown me how ill-informed the general public and my fellow teachers are. Please, do what teachers do best – seek information and learn. Here are some great places to start: http://weblogg-ed.com/, http://williamkist.com/blog/,
http://davidloertscher.wordpress.com/. Play around with it a bit!
