An independent, college preparatory, co-ed, Episcopal Day School serves a community of students in grades 6-12.
Issue link: http://palmertrinityschool.uberflip.com/i/190521
Technology becomes anything people use as extensions of themselves to manifest themselves in the world. 64s, wrote papers and designed newspaper pages on Macs and PCs, and created my own web pages in HoTMetaL. I've always been writing and teaching, and technology has always been an essential part of both. More often than not, though, I take it as a fundamental truth that far too many educators still think about technology as if they were backward-looking scholastics, not forward-looking tribals. As far as teaching is concerned, it sometimes seems there are just as many teachers running from the digital age as plunging into it. We're not that far from Socrates and Plato's dialectics when it comes to computers in the classroom. Independent schools offer many wonderful educational benefits to their students. At the same time, there are often less directly stated dynamics at work in independent schools that create tensions with information technology. Private schools in general are perceived as being more safe from the "outside world," but information technology "Where are you coming from and where are you going to?" readily weakens the walls of the ivory tower. Also, in a traditional "sage-on-the-stage" classroom, much of the teacher's authority is centered on "holding" the information the students need for assessments, but information technology makes it harder and harder for teachers to keep their course materials under their control. Most schools have very good reasons for banning smart phones, and most of those schools find it almost impossible to enforce those bans. Information wants to be free, and free information empowers people. Laptops and smart phones and search engines make more permeable the boundaries of any school, and, much more problematic for the scholastics, information tech alters the power dynamics between students and teachers. These changes have little to do with the subject matter taught, and everything to do with the varieties of institutional power. And if the scholastic elites hold too tightly to the power that doesn't flow in the old familiar channels, they may lose more and more relevance for the high-tech tribals who seek only to prepare themselves for the digital pluralism of the decades to come. Who knows what brilliant tribals might step into the forum when the scholastics finally do some remodeling of the ivory tower? Mr. Hayes hosts a roundtable discussion during 11th grade American Studies class. Using the classroom as a technological device, face-to-face conversation allows students to communicate in ways that aren't possible with laptops and other digital devices. S U M M E R / F A L L 2 0 1 3 17