Commentary: Using Technology to Create a Dynamic Classroom Experience

Educational Journal: Journal of College Teaching & Learning-Second Quarter 2012 Volume 9, Number 2

Title:  Using Technology to Create a Dynamic Classroom Experience
Authors: Bari Courts and Jan Tucker.

Commentary on Article: 

What do you think of when you hear “The Dry Eyes Guy”?  Some may look at you with confusion; some will give you this deep look as if they are in heavy thought and running through their memory bank searching through rows and rows of memories trying to recall a “Dry Eyes Guy”.  Then someone will look at you and laugh, and say something to the effect “I had a teacher just like that guy, it was the worst!”  If you’re unfamiliar with actor Ben Stein and the commercial he is in for Clear Eyes: eye drops, simply imagine someone speaking in a drawn out, low monotone voice.  Now imagine a professor or teacher that fits the mold. Did you have an educator like that?  We almost always come up with one or two examples.  Luckily for students and some could say for education, the times have changed. Tradition has evolved from 2 hour lectures, to a more interactional approach.  Take for instance an example from a previous technological development, the television.  Throughout the beginning of the television era using it as an education tool was shunned upon.  “Many Critics of television, to this day, argue that what’s dangerous about TV is that it is addictive, that children and even adults watch it like zombies. According to this view, it is the formal features of television-violence, bright lights, loud and funny noises, quick editing cuts, zooming in and out, exaggerated action, and all the other things we associate with commercial TV--- that hold our attention. In other words we don’t have to understand what we are looking at, or absorb what we are seeing, in order to keep watching”. (Gladwell, 2000)From this stand point, we can easily denounce any sort of educational growth associated with television viewing.  This seemed cut and dry for most at the beginning of the television programming.  What many did agree on was television is a great way to reach A LOT of people, entertain, and dazzle them.  But why not educate them? That is the exact question Joan Ganz Cooney asker herself and others in the late 1960s when she had a vision for television programming to be aimed at the education medium. Her idea was to target literacy in three, four and five year olds. Can you think of what Cooney was on the verge of starting?  She wanted to fight the challenges of literacy so many children from disadvantaged homes face in their first years of schooling.  Her idea would later be named SEASAME STREET. “Gerald Lesser, a Harvard university psychologist who joined with Cooney in founding Sesame Street, says that when he was first asked to join the project back in the late 1960s, he was skeptical. “I had always been very much into fitting how you teach to what you know about the child,” he says. “You try to find the kid’s strengths, so you can play to them. You try to understand the kid’s weakness, so you can avoid them. Then you try and teach that individual kid’s profile…Television has no potential, no power to do that. A television is just a talking box. (Gladwell, 2000) Upon reading that, it seems easy to discount once again the concept of using TV as an education medium. Then something amazing happened. After years of research and academic scrutiny Seasame Street was proven to increase literacy and learning functions for early childhood development.  Now could you imagine not having Sesame Street as a tool for parents or teachers?  The use of technology in the educational arena still to this day goes through a gauntlet of scrutiny, and this will continue until sufficent data proves that technology help in learning, so far no such data exists.

                This of course is just my opinion, but authors Bari Courts and Jan Tucker seem to agree, in their published article “Using Technology to Create A dynamic Classroom Experience”.   “Multimedia, which uses the internet as its transfer mechanism, can be an effective method of creating a dynamic college classroom experience ( Tucker, Courts 2012).   The education process isn’t a mystery, we know scientifically that there are different learning styles for everyone. While I cannot argue the effectiveness of traditional teaching strategies, I can argue we have a better understanding of students needs. We also know the sources of information at our disposal are at the single highest point in human history.  Take into account people spend 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook. (Courts & Tucker, 2012) Technology is everywhere, at any point I can Google any topic I want and come up with millions and millions of hits, from the Stanford Prisons Project, to  Masonic Temple symbolism, I have access to information instantly.  We even use GOOGLE as a noun!  This article covers a wide variety of ways educators can help educators.  The introduction of Open Courseware such as MIT’s OCW was first brought to my attention through this very article.  If you’re unfamiliar with what open courseware is, think of it as publishing every one of our lesson plans, assignments, quizzes, lecture notes, guest speaker video’s, and class exercises online for the world wide web to view free of charge.  It’s an incredible idea targeted towards educators helping educators, and independent learners who just want the information minus the degree. 30 years ago this wasn’t at all possible, but now I have access to full MIT course material 24 hours a day 365 days a week.  It’s not about which school can get more students, this is an idea, about education in its truest form, openly accessed for anyone and everyone, from citizens of a country that might not have universities to the 16 year old that begs for more college level type education, it’s all accessible, and the authors of this journal do a great job pointing out the continuous trend of such uses of technology. 

After reading this publication, I found myself excited about the future of education, and enthusiastic about the possibilities we have because of technology. The ability to reach a more diverse group of students, and actually REACH them.  Students who are visual learners, or auditory learners, we can now adapt a curriculum or lesson plan that touches upon all of their needs. While I felt authors Bari and Jan did a fantastic job using data and citing sources pertinent to the theme of their publication , introducing technological helpers for a wide range of teachers, I think they missed a huge opportunity to address the ways this could potentially change how we deal with student IEPs, and students that might fall through the cracks with a traditional set up of Lecture and Exams.  Some instructors may still look at this as having no merit for their classroom, because the way they have taught has been successful for the last XZY amount of years. However, if the authors could have also addressed that with the changes in technology our student’s needs and special needs have also continually changed.  Instructors should know that, student needs continually evolve, just as much as technology does; only we can use technology to help us reach these students and help them reach their goals that without technology they might not have

Reference:

Gladwell, M. (2000). The tipping point. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company Hachette Book Company.

Courts, B., & Tucker, J. (2012). Using technology to create a dynamic classroom experience. Educational Journal: Journal of College Teaching & Learning, 9(2),