Sunday, November 1, 2009

What's The Most Important Thing Teachers of Today Need to Realize or Learn?

An educator I follow on Twitter,  thecleversheep, tweeted this this morning:
Care to share your wisdom? Looking for global representation in a preso on Collaboration: http://bit.ly/4gfNqy (retweets appreciated)
When I clicked the link, here's the question I was faced with:
What is the most important thing teachers of today need to realize, or need to learn?
One of those thought provokers! Here was my response:
The World Wide Web was invented in 1989; it is 20 years old. For students in K-12 education today, the Web has always existed. There has never been a world without it. Teachers who are 30 years old or older had little or no exposure to "growing up online" or learning online when they themselves were students. They certainly did not have the unsupervised access to technology that today's students have - nor did they have the opportunities for global learning. To stay relevant in our pedagogical approaches and to equip students to survive and thrive in the digital world where they already live, we must become adopters of the technology ourselves. We may never be immersed to the extent our students are, but to ignore the digital world in our personal and professional lives is a great disservice to our students.

How would you answer that very same question? Post a comment here, and while you're at it, post a response for thecleversheep's pesentation.