Digital Eyes

I was having a discussion with a colleague today about digital coping skills. It got me thinking about the difference between analog and digital coping skills, especially as they relate to teaching. In my opinion, teachers are excellent at coping with a lot of issues. Nothing in a classroom ever goes exactly as planned, but you don't see teachers throwing up their hands and saying, "Forget it!" They deal with misbehaving kids, running out of paper, broken pencils, messy chalk, fire drills, spills, interruptions, and much more. These things rarely phase good teachers. They take it all in stride and continue on. In fact, to the casual observer, they might not even notice that anything had happened. Why then, do so many of these same teachers seem to feel that technological mishaps are such huge roadblocks? Why are digital coping skills so different from "analog" coping skills? Is it that they require teachers to do some troubleshooting that they may not feel quali...

The other day, I had the pleasure of observing our high school orchestra. I spoke with the teacher about his use of SmartMusic with students. It was really amazing. I had heard quite a bit about it before, but to see how he used it in class and then seamlessly assigned the music to students so students could practice their part at home with accompaniment and record their practice session, get instant feedback, create a portfolio, and create a circle of communication between student, teacher and parent was unbelievable. I also saw a PE class in which the students used exercise equipment to track their health. They exercised at their target heart rate for a period of time and then recorded their pulse, calories burned, etc... It got me thinking, "How do we do this in other subjects?" Imagine students reading pieces of text into a microphone and getting instant feedback on their fluency and decoding! Then being assigned "just right" books based on the results and email...