Cheers, Teach!

So the thought of  self-directed, tech-mediated learning has been on my mind for the last few weeks. This thought came to me when watching a video that stated:

Any teacher that can be replaced with a computer, should be. 

My problem with this is that I know teachers like that. I know teachers who just couldn't teach well and I can honestly say that a computer would have done a better job.

However I have so many social and economic arguments against educators being replaced by technology. If there is the resource for a teacher to be employed, they should be. And no, I'm not just fighting for my own future job availability. Here are my arguments:

Students already spend too much time engrossed in a screens that they are surrounded with and this makes them blind to the world around them and we become desensitised to human behaviour and human emotion.

Young people can often hide behind the confidence of a screen and digital world. Although this might empower students temporarily, the confidence they gain could remain only behind a screen and not transfer to their daily face-to-face interactions that will always be necessary as humans.

South Africa struggles with intense unemployment rates and we find technology taking the jobs from humans on a daily basis. To boost employment, GDP and quality of living for South Africans, we can't afford to be taking their jobs away.

In a teacher to child relationship, I feel that the human contact is necessary for one is so influenced by the input and investment educators make in the lives of their learners.

Above are only some of my arguments against online self-directed, tech-mediated learning.

HOWEVER

When distance learning comes into play and the community/individuals cannot afford a good education taught by an actual person or don't have the resources to have a school infrastructure, then I find a need for distance learning can be filled by technology.

One would just have to carefully moderate how it affects the growth of children intellectually, socially and emotionally.

Not ready to say, "Cheers, Teach" yet!

Don't BReckless with Social Media!

Social media is sometimes painted as a dark and scary place. I prefer to see it as a place where all the lights are on, as the world is watching social media. Constantly.  If you don't believe me, watch anyone between the ages of 14-25. Our eyes are constantly glued to a screen and receiving input from there, or as my #PGCEmix lecturer likes to put it, students are constantly "staring at their laps and smiling". 

Instead of letting social media control us, let's master it and control it. 

Therefore, after reading the blogs written by Davis and Provenzano, I have devised ways of mastering technology in my lessons to gets students captivated. 

My Curriculum Studies specializations are Accounting and Mathematical Literacy, 

Accounting

- Use online shopping sites such as Superbalist to track the effect and stages of a transaction. 

- Furthermore use the transaction to work out VAT. 

- Use Social Media blogs and comment sections to add onto other students definition of assets, liabilities and owners equity. 

- For research into company culture, try get a company to reply to your tweet.

- Inspect a companies Facebook profile for information for projects.

Mathematical Literacy

- Use twitter retweets to calculate the effect of exponential growth. 

- Calculate probabilities of Instagram likes with or without #Hashtags. 

- Calculate the pattern and relationship between the amount of #Hastags and retweets. 

- Time the average amount of time it takes to get a instagram like at different times of the day, to calculate how frequent people are visiting social media. 

The possibilities are running wild and my mind is racing. I just thought to myself, I should write these down for future reference... then I remembered I was writing it on a blog so its not going anywhere. 

Woah. Sometimes I sound silly. 

Thank you for this task, it has given me a brilliant idea for my next Glaskas.