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In a world that is more connected than ever before, we must ensure that we, as educators, impart upon our students the necessary skills and dispositions to become active and productive participants in that interconnectivity. Our students will create and interact with information through a wide range of multimodal (print, video, audio, image, etc..) experiences. These interactions should be taken advantage of to allow our students to develop responsible, ethical and critical views of the plethora of knowledge available to them. Through these myriad methods of engagement in connectivity, our students should be made more aware of the rapidly shrinking size of the world. Our students should be developing appropriate discourses that will allow them to not only communicate across distances, but also a diverse array of languages and cultures.

 

As effective educators we must recognize the impact that technology is having on the students that we teach. We have the opportunity to utilize these new resources to develop more engaging and authentic learning experiences for the students in our classrooms. Educators should be willing to make learning a partnership between student and teacher. In doing so we will begin to transition our role from "Sage on the stage" to "Guide by the side", allowing our students flexibility in their work to truly demonstrate their learning. The question "Am I more interested in knowing what my students have learned or that they can all produce a similar project following the "right" design parameters?" should be addressed through critical reflection. 

 

We claim to teach individual students and encourage them to be creative. Yet we ask them to all complete the same assessments, to regurgitate facts and figures, to follow the format laid out by the rubric that typically focuses on structure rather than content. Another question I often ask myself "What are we teaching our students to be? Are we teaching them to continue to be students (i.e. college) or are we teaching them to be functional and productive members of society?"

 

These are the thoughts that guide me as I teach and learn.