Let’s follow their lead!
“‘[Technology improving education] wasn’t even on the school district’s radar,’ Taggart says. ’The schools are all thinking about No Child Left Behind.’ ”But Taggart saw a direct correlation between lackluster school perfromance and old-fashioned classrooms and teaching methods she encountered.”
This quote is from Linda Taggart, a principal at Correia Middle School in San Diego, CA, and it comes at the beginning of an article entitled “Trashing the Chalkboards” from the voiceofsandiego.org. Taggart, together with a local entrepreneur named Matt Spathas, created a program a few years ago called Project Light Speed that is meant to
“Teach the kids using the tools they know. Embrace technology.”
It is not the students that have to be taught technology; that is not what this program is about. What it is really about it using
“technology to foster valuable lifelong skills, such as critical thinking and creativity.”
There are, the article mentions, alarming rates of students dropping out of school and getting poor test scores, as well as how far the United States is falling behind other countries like China and India in this technological age. What Taggart and her cohort Spathas believe the best way to get students from
“having to learn to wanting to learn” is to “engage them with relevant tools and subject matter.”
Students can easily adapt to the constantly updated and changing technologies and that the curriculum of schools should be able to keep up as well. Otherwise, old methods are being applied to modern ideas and societies, and students quickly lose interest.
Taggart’s middle school students are creating, with ease, e-portfolios (which are records of their school work that will follow them to high school) and multimedia projects; they are taking quizzes/tests online and using “Ibraries” (modern information libraries with sources beyond books) instead of old-fashioned libraries.
Since the project was started four years ago, half of the schools in the Point Loma district have joined in, at least to some extent.
“‘There’s an art to teaching, [Principal Bobbie Samilson of Point Loma High] points out. “You have to figure out how to engage the kids and do everything we can do to make them more excited about learning. Light Speed has been very important in changing education, not limiting it. When a kid says they’re bored, we now have more options than ever before.”
Now if only more administrators and officials shared the same point of view as Taggart and Spathas. Instead of focusing on the set standards of education alone, we should be focusing more on how best to make our education standards competitive to those countries we are quickly falling behind. The best way to go about that is to constantly evaluate and update the technology of schools not only to keep up with the rest of the world, but also to keep our students interested and engaged on the subjects they must learn.
“Trashing the Chalkboards” Full Article
