21st Century Teachers

The video I chose to watch talked about how teachers in the 21st century need to learn new ways of teaching students. An example it gave was how a college student was struggling to learn the material in class and asked her professor to change his approach in how he taught but wouldn't consider it and just went on with the same lectures as always. Another was a little girl wanted her dad to be able to see her do show and tell so she asked if she could use Skype during it, but the school had it blocked.

One thing the video kept repeating was "we need our teachers to learn." At first I thought it meant students need teachers so they can learn new things, but the more I thought about it I think what it was really saying is students need teachers to learn new things so they can teach students. Students learn so differently in today's time with all the advances in technology. It is up to teachers to explore different methods of teaching to find what works best for the students in their classrooms. I think many teachers today have trouble with this because many just teach the way they were taught. If we really care about the students though, we will find a way to break the chain of the everyday teaching and teach the way students really need us to.

Mr. Winkle Wakes

I found the video about Mr. Winkle really interesting. At first when it started, I thought it was going to be about the importance of technology in the classroom because of all the things that were new to Mr. Winkle when he woke up like computers, x-ray machines in hospitals, etc. In the end, it turns out that even though all these advances in technology had been made, education in the classroom had stayed the same for one hundred years. When you stop and think about it this is really sad.

Students today are not the same as students one hundred years ago. They have so many resources available to them that students in the past did not have. Students today need to have the opportunity to explore what interests them instead of being lectured everyday. Like from the previous post, if teachers don't let students take advantage of all the opportunities available to them we're going to have a world full of boring people with no imagination and nothing new ever being created. I think since we're living in a world with technology constantly changing, it is up to teachers to be on their toes and change the way we teach students.

The Importance of Creativity

In the video I watched, Sir Ken Robinson talked about the importance of creativity in the classroom today. He says that creativity is just as important as literacy and teachers are taking this away from students. I agree with him. Teachers spend too much time in the classroom drilling fact after fact and don't really give students the opportunity to think for themselves and explore things that interest them.

Later, he says that children are afraid of being wrong. I also agree with this statement because I am one of these students. The reality is though that we learn more when we are wrong. I think that it takes doing things the wrong way a few times is the only way we truly understand when we finally do them right. If we take creativity away from students, eventually we will have a world where everyone does the same thing and thinks the same way. That would be a very boring world!