There is no more debate
Posted on: October 22, 2011
To the tech luddites I say: There is no more debate on whether technology should be infused, integrated or embedded into education.
There is a saying in Singapore: If you don’t study hard, you will fail. If you do study hard, you may pass.
Applying this to educational technology, I say that if you don’t integrate technology meaningfully, you will get left behind. If you do, you might just keep up and reap the benefits.
Worse still, if you don’t integrate technology properly, you do a disservice to your students. You won’t be modelling positive behaviours and taking advantage of mistakes (yours and your learners) so that they become teachable moments. You certainly won’t be building a bridge to our learners’ world.
If we don’t integrate technology, we will not show our learners how to responsibly tap the rich resources, how to contribute meaningfully to the collective and how to think or react when they experience something negative.
It’s time to shut up and just do something about it. Never mind if it means more work or if you fail. You will get better at it, the process gets easier and you will learn from your experiences.
There should be no more debate about the role of technology in education. If there is a debate at all, it should centre on how well we integrate technology, not if we should integrate technology.
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