What does all of this mean? All of these incredible numbers that challenge our brains and the possibilities and challenges that exist, what does that mean to you? What does that mean to people like us, who are in the infancy stages of our career in education? There are a number of cliches that would seem appropriate but I can only see two possibilities. We can either ignore it and hope that these facts will not affect us in our little corner of the world or we can embrace it, use it for the number of possibilities and opportunities that we can try and utilize.
If we choose the former, I think that we're ignoring one of the messages of the video. This growth, this explosion is reaching everyone, everywhere and it's gaining momentum with every fraction of a second. It calls into question our role as educators. Do we allow the world to bypass us and cling to what is comfortable because of an imagined sense of security while our students are working with ideas and materials that are being outdated? Again, I think that this route can only be temporary. Inevitably this is going to affect all of us in the teaching profession, everywhere. This is only if you have haven't already felt the rising tide of this movement.
So what choice do we have but to embrace it? To do what we challenge and expect our students to do. To challenge ourselves, step outside of our comfort zone and allow for the possibilities that come with it. Regardless of age, content, or cognitive levels our students are already ahead of us. So why not harness that embedded knowledge and engagement and use it to our advantage? As we learn new concepts and theories to help our students we often question the implementation of these ideas and discard them as implausible. So instead we see that our children flounder in areas such as math and stick to the ineffective pedagogical practices because "that's how we learned". If we stick to the tools that we used then we are restricted to the methods that we learned through. So what does all this mean? If we want to be teachers, to educate, to grow as we ask our students to learn, than we must take this journey with them.
What does all of this mean? All of these incredible numbers that challenge our brains and the possibilities and challenges that exist, what does that mean to you? What does that mean to people like us, who are in the infancy stages of our career in education? There are a number of cliches that would seem appropriate but I can only see two possibilities. We can either ignore it and hope that these facts will not affect us in our little corner of the world or we can embrace it, use it for the number of possibilities and opportunities that we can try and utilize.
If we choose the former, I think that we're ignoring one of the messages of the video. This growth, this explosion is reaching everyone, everywhere and it's gaining momentum with every fraction of a second. It calls into question our role as educators. Do we allow the world to bypass us and cling to what is comfortable because of an imagined sense of security while our students are working with ideas and materials that are being outdated? Again, I think that this route can only be temporary. Inevitably this is going to affect all of us in the teaching profession, everywhere. This is only if you have haven't already felt the rising tide of this movement.
So what choice do we have but to embrace it? To do what we challenge and expect our students to do. To challenge ourselves, step outside of our comfort zone and allow for the possibilities that come with it. Regardless of age, content, or cognitive levels our students are already ahead of us. So why not harness that embedded knowledge and engagement and use it to our advantage? As we learn new concepts and theories to help our students we often question the implementation of these ideas and discard them as implausible. So instead we see that our children flounder in areas such as math and stick to the ineffective pedagogical practices because "that's how we learned". If we stick to the tools that we used then we are restricted to the methods that we learned through. So what does all this mean? If we want to be teachers, to educate, to grow as we ask our students to learn, than we must take this journey with them.