Do you know an aunt or uncle or maybe even you mum or dad who would tell a story that start off with…In my time…? Well one day over coffee room conversation about students and their constant use of cellphones, I became that person. This was not just a realization that I am getting old, but more importantly it was one that set the wheels in motion for me to rethink the way in which I teach. This journey was the start of many adventures in uncharted waters (well for me at least).
Years of planning, experimenting implementing and getting feedback on various technology solutions aimed at classrooms and training environments of which the students were most definitely ready for but not so much our institution or my fellow lecturers. Often many trainers and lecturers or teachers have a vision of how to better engage students with technology solutions but these are not shared by the company or learning institution’s decision makers. This can become such a tedious process that they give up or when the company adopt technology that is not what they have in mind they lost steam in the process of trying to find the best solutions and to convince others. I share much of my own experience on this journey in an academic article. You can scan the QR code for this at the end of this post if you would like to read it.
Only much later as I started asking questions as to why some brilliant technologies sit on the shelf and gather dust did I understand that the integration of technology is very personal. Sometimes there is a sense of ‘what was good enough for me should be good enough for them’. There is this misconception that teachers should know everything and when we face a technology that we are not comfortable ourselves we hesitate to implement it into our training environments.
Lately the trend is that to be cutting edge you have to have cutting edge technology to enhance your training environment which brought about another issue that many trainers and teachers face and that is that with the new hype of AI these training technologies will take over our jobs as teachers.
I do not believe that this is true, on the contrary if we can effectively use it to our advantage we can have more time to actually do all the other things required of us well and make us indispensable! I think with proper planning and understanding of the technology, the end user and the environment in which these should be implemented that we can create learning and training environments that truly engage and foster learning.
