Job Number One: Modeling Online Learning

The most important goal of every teacher today should be to successfully model how to use the Internet for learning, creating, collaborating, problem solving, and DOING rather than merely using it for entertainment.

Why?  Because the Internet is both the keeper of all things known to man as well as the keeper of all the evil distractions.  A person can learn anything online, or they could spend the rest of their life watching YouTube videos and playing Words with Friends on FaceBook.  As of right now, we aren't using technology enough in our learning environments to teach students anything about its most powerful abilities.  Most teachers, for whatever reason, refuse to embrace its use or modify their lessons to leverage its power.  They won't take the time needed to learn what is necessary to teach kids how to use what could be the most powerful human invention ever for good rather than evil.  OK, entertaining yourself into a drooling mass of meat isn't exactly evil, but it's a far cry from using the Internet to its potential.

Here is an excerpt from Stop Stealing Dreams by Seth Godin:
Just as online shopping scaled, an inexorable rise due to the efficiencies of the connections created by the net, so will the digital delivery of information permeate every nook and cranny of what we learn.


What we can't do, though, is digitize passion.  We can't force the student to want to poke around and discover new insights online.  We can't merely say, "here," and presume the students will do the hard (and scary) work of getting over the hump and conquering their fears.


We (educators) have to model that passion.  We have to be the bridge between the world of knowledge available online and the method of its delivery, since teachers' time as THE method of delivery is over.  Our desire to entertain ourselves may outweigh our desire for knowledge unless someone shows us the way to love learning digitally.

Who is going to do that?  Certainly not the teacher who finds every excuse NOT to use technology.  Definitely not the teacher who says they don't have time to learn how to leverage the Internet's capabilities in their classroom.  What's scary is that the vast majority of teachers I've met fit into those two categories, despite what they may say about the importance of using technology or how much they say they want to use it.

If you are one of the teachers who says they don't have time:  make time.  How did you have time to learn anything you know today?  Didn't it take time?  It's a matter of priority, and I don't want to wait until an entire generation of Internet users care only about their high score to decide to do something about it.