1:1 Computing, and other, less fact-based stuff.

I recently got some news from my old high school.  Two things:  One pretty great and the other . . . I don't quite know how to feel about yet.  The first, and (pretty great) piece of news is that my high school is moving to 1:1 teaching over the next few years.  The other(and far more ambiguous news) is that a teacher I had in my last few years there is retiring. 

First, One-to-One Computing!  Fantastic!  Great!  Awesome!  If you haven't read up on any of this stuff, Start here, and here, and then move on, perhaps, to here.  This is even more amazing when you remember that my High School is Tiny.  and I really mean tiny.  I graduated with 67 other students, and we were the largest class in over a decade.  The whole thing might have 300.  On a good year.  The point is that our tiny agricultural school in Iowa will be moving to having one computer for every student.  Wow.  If that's not a sign that the future is literally happening all around us, I don't know what is.  

Seriously, Its like this.

The other News, though, has something to do with this as well.  When my old teacher told me she was retiring (We keep in touch), I was pretty bummed out at first.  I think that's understandable, She was a fantastic teacher.  She instilled in me a real love of learning (though to be fair, I was always a good student, and I was naturally pretty inquisitive), and that nerdiness has carried me through to becoming a teacher myself.

She was one of many great educators I experienced there, but that being said, I've come to realize that almost all my teachers taught in a style that really only benefited me, and students like me.  It was a Teacher heavy style: lecture, test, lecture, test, lecture, paper, etc., but it didn't work for a lot of the students.  I saw a lot of drifting of the student body away from any sort of learning just because they weren't engaged.  Its not that these teachers couldn't use technology, its just that they never learned how to use it to help students learn.  It was a curiosity, a fun add-on for projects, a nice break.  Its not that they were against technology, or that they weren't pretty snappy with those macbooks, it was that they had never learned how to incorporate it.

They were the old guard.  The ancient tweedy ones.  The lecturers.

Now, as I'm studying to join their ranks, I'm taking classes specifically geared to teach me how to use these new technologies to engage my kids.  I can't fall into the same traps as the old guard, as the tweedy ones.  I can't let the world change around me; because now even rural Iowa is going to have 1:1 teaching.

Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt, used under a Creative Commons license.