Technology Teachers and Myths, Post
Technology Teachers and Myths
Technology Teachers and Myths! There are some extreme views around. Technology teachers, their education websites and journals, frequently portray teaching methods of the pre-internet era as ‘obsolete’. Teachers still use pre-internet teaching methods. All are savagely criticized as outdated. Examples of these views can be found at this website:
https://educationtechnologysolutions.com.au
Talking about technology, this post details the outrageous statements of one professor in Australia about handwriting. How outdated her views seem in 2023! Link: Cursive Script – Debate, Post
What are ‘obsolete’ in their view are methods involving
- teaching from paper-based materials;
- teachers talking to a class from the front of the room; and
- students learning facts and memorizing content.
What is embedded in the articles is the condescending notion that teachers talk for long periods. Teachers also bore their students and that students still are learning by rote. No thinking involved! They state that kids in classrooms copy without thought.
Are these Technology teachers in schools talking about the nineteenth or the twenty-first century? Even in the 1970s, students were learning in a variety of ways, such as 
- whole-class instruction at the beginning of a lesson,
- individual learning, and
- group work and practicals.
How much do these technology teachers think we can fit into a 40 or 50 minute lesson anyway? The younger the children are, the shorter each learning project must be! As children get older, their capacity increases for taking on learning projects over extended periods.
Primary School Priorities: Let’s get the priorities right. It is a priority for young children to learn to read and write. This involves some copying. That’s okay because as young kids they enjoy it. They get practice in letter and number shapes, they strengthen their hands, and develop their fine motor skills. Research tells us that the skills in writing reinforce reading.
It is a priority for children to learn their times tables. They enjoy memorising them and feel the achievement – because after memorising them they find it much easier to calculate. They learn their alphabet by heart. They learn songs and rhymes. Why not the times tables?
This link will take you to an early post on this website that explains the importance of learning to hand-write. This is not just for its pragmatic objectives but for its effects on the functions in the brain, called Hand-Writing Is An Intellectual Activity. https://www.tutoringprimary.com/hand-writing-intellectual-activity/
Results of this method: Often, understanding comes after memorisation. Children need facts to manipulate in their minds. Facts are the meat in the sandwich. They find it interesting that an ant colony can have several queens and a bee hive only one queen. They need a stash of facts from which to springboard into their own learning. The point of learning to read is to open the door to information. By presenting children with information to start with, we are turning the key and the handle for them.
So, when they have done the memorising —
>>getting their sums right
>>learning how to organise their table space, their paperwork and drawings
–then they are ready for everything that the Technology teachers can present.
Proposed changes to curricula involving teaching children to do coding is a great step forward. It is not a corollary of this, however, that pencils and paper are obsolete. We can’t have the next generation saying, “Oh, sorry, I can’t take any notes because I haven’t got iPad”.
How children think: What looks like boring old stuff for Technology teachers in schools is really fascinating, challenging and fun for primary school children.
Nor do the older students learn by rote, listen to long boring lectures from teachers, or copy without understanding or purpose.
If an older student is ‘bored’ it is just possible that he was enticed by the latest technology to reinvent the wheel for himself at primary school. It got bogged in the mud. It is possible the older students didn’t learn their times tables years before when it fun so they can’t cope with their maths. So maths becomes ‘boring’.
Some Technology teachers may be projecting their own prejudices upon today’s teachers and students. They do this with images of other teaching methods — as if anything that doesn’t involve an ipad is out of date. It’s a wonder they haven’t brought the cane into their discussion.