Technology for the sake of technology?
McKenzies’ article, Stuffing technology into the curriculum, argues that technology is being used in the classroom in ways which are redundant and counterproductive. He believes that technology should be used meaningfully as a tool to assist learning, not as a series of exercises that must be done to fulfil departmental criteria. I tend to agree with his view, having seen on practicum last semester a few examples of how ICT (Information and Computer technology) is used in an everyday classroom.
One particular example that was not particularly well integrated was a lesson where students copied and pasted data from the ABS into an excel spreadsheet to create a chart. Of course I think its a great idea that students are taught how to do this! The issue I had with the lesson, though, was that the data the students were using was not related to anything else they were learning about at the time. I think it would have been better if the students could have made a graph relating to their COGS topic of machines, after perhaps collecting some data themselves. This lesson was basically done to tick a box, and I think the students would have found it more useful, relevant and perhaps remembered what they had learnt better if it had been incorporated into their current unit of work.
