Authentic Doing in Education

I’m often posed questions from teachers such as: “How can I use more technology in my teaching?” My response is always to leave “tech” out of the question and instead examine your own curricular needs and desires. What follows is a note I wrote to one of our English teachers responding to a similar question above.

Where are students struggling? In what areas can they be pushed further?
What are your own frustrations in the communication process with students and/or between students re: course-related discussions, sharing and dissemination of ideas?
If you could wave a magic wand engage your students in something you only dreamt about - what would that be?
Are you interested in strengthening (or overhauling) the way students analyze and evaluate each other’s work and ideas?
Do you have ideas of engaging them with other students in other areas/states/countries?
Are you interested in connecting your students with grad students as writing mentors? Engaging them with younger students?
Are you interested in having students construct knowledge that is meaningful to others?
What about creating a web of writing prompts via websites, sounds, images?
Student publishing of their creative work?
Team or whole class-based project creation—similar to Telling Their Stories?
Is there any interest/room in the curriculum to have students conducting interviews with local writers, playwrights, poets, artists, composers, etc?

The bottom line is not to think about tech but rather consider potentials unattempted or unperfected in your own teaching and curriculum development work, Then, perhaps, there is a solution that I can help direct you. To me, the two most powerful uses of technology are:

1. Everyday, ordinary reliance on the tool (writing, reading, and creating) becoming “normalized.”
2. Opportunities to do something powerful and meaningful that in earlier times would have been considered utopian, or at best, impossible, such as student conducted oral history that is then published to a world-wide audience as a primary source.