February 18th, 2010 by Rachel | Tags: Anthropology, Classroom, Material Culture, School, Technology | No Comments »
At the Material World blog, I read a blog entry about technologies emerging in classroom and it presented an article about the latest technologies created for the classrooms – click here to view the article. The writer brought up a very good set of questions that made me want to think:
“As the school classroom becomes increasingly technologically sophisticated, how much do we really learn at school anyway? And what is wrong with the trusted ruler, compass and blackboard? Surely, these are questions to be asked by anthropologists.”
I wrote a response to this question in the comment area:
While many technologies are deemed unnecessary for the classroom, some of them really help make teachers’ jobs more efficient. For example, teachers are using a computer software that calculates students’ grades for them. When some of my grandparents were teachers from 1950’s to 1990’s, they didn’t have a computer at all, and they had to spend hours calculating the grades. One of my grandmothers had to take a few “sick days” just to spend the entire day catching up on calculating the grades.
I have to say that the electronic white board that I saw in the video clip is very useful in the classrooms, especially for those who are hearing impaired and others with certain disabilities as they often struggle to take their own notes. Because everything that is written on the board is saved to the computer, teachers can print out the notes that they wrote on the board and give them to the students who struggled in taking notes.
Also, eBooks such as Kindle and iPad will help improve the well-being of the students because they will not have to strain their back while carrying a large number of heavy textbooks. I suffered several back pains in middle and high school when I was carrying a heavy backpack.
On the other hand, technologies like those robots in the video clip are just silly. It’s not the technology that allows the teachers to become better teachers. It’s how well the teachers can articulate in their subject area and explain in a way that the students can understand what they are teaching.
All in all, technologies have both a positive and a negative effect in the classrooms.
What are your thoughts?
