As a technology teacher, I always keep looking for new tools to excite my students. During parent-teacher conferences, when a parent comes and asks me how’s their child doing at my subject I almost always say, “Everyone is good at technology” or “All of them love ICT lessons”.
But when I’m alone, I reflect on these statements many times. If everyone already loves technology and is good at it, then what am I here for? What’s my role? This is a generation of digital natives. You show a two-year-old how to scroll through the camera roll of your phone once and they won’t ask you again. This makes me question my validity again and again.
If these children are born with the skills, do they really need someone to show them how to use a tool? Will they remember me if I just teach them how to add bullets to their Word document or how to change the speed of a video to slow motion while making a movie? Would it matter to them later in their lives? They would have figured it out themselves eventually, through self-exploration as I did.
Today, out of the blue, this realisation hit me that if I keep my content at the centre, there’s nothing much about me as a teacher which my students will take with themselves as a life lesson. What they will and MUST remember me for is making them understand that if they use someone else’s account details to login, it’s as much a crime as it is breaking into someone’s house.
They should remember me for educating them that using someone else’s work as their own is as much a sin as lying. They have to be reminded of what I told them once about a nasty post staying on the Internet forever even after you delete it before they go on and get carried away into doing something like that. They’ll obviously remember me when setting their net banking password to “w€LCom#$79” and not “welcome12”.
And when they’re parents themselves and thinking about which video games to let their children play, they’ll have to think of me while installing that counting game and telling their child, “Oh it’s such a lovely game about making a rainbow with all these beans. Let’s see how many there are!”
This thought was definitely quite a relief because it solidified my purpose of being here. As a technology teacher, I’m not here just to teach the coding or the presentations. I’m here to teach some vital lessons for life which count! Don’t be driven by the content. Keep the pedagogy as your nucleus to make yourself count. We are technology teachers and yes, we matter!
This article originally appeared in Issue 51 on the UKEdMagazine. Click here to view.
@sansanananana Primary ICT Coordinator – Delhi/NCR, India
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