I am still trying to figure out what pedagogy is and what exactly it means to be a pedagogue. All these terms are floating by on a daily basis, some of us nod and some of us (me) just sit there wondering about what exactly this means.
At first I thought of it as the method of teaching used by educators, that made most sense, but now I am not entirely sure. As I see it now, pedagogy to me is the way the tools of teaching and learning are used by educators to help the learner in the learning process. Not all teachers are pedagogues, some give learners work to do and they do it for the sake of doing it and they do not learning a whole lot in that process because as soon as the test/assessment is done they have forgotten the work because it is no longer needed.
The tools used to teach should always be new and innovative even if the content being taught stays the same over some time. Take the instance of the LMS, it was to be something advanced, but it turned out to be something that limits the users and make the "learning" nothing new, just the same information on a new platform.
We have to innovate to continue learning and not get comfortable when things start working out, these boundaries need to be pushed so that we can continue to find new ways to learn.
So to even be considered as a digital pedagogue we should consider the students as active learners who are part of the process of teaching. We have to use the tools available to us to do something new and to get the students learning through new ways of teaching and discovery.
Digital pedagogy does not have a specific definition, it is merely they way that we as teachers continue to work and innovate to do new things with the content that needs to be presented.
Wednesday, 24 February 2016
Wednesday, 17 February 2016
Digital pedagogy
The whole idea around digital pedagogy is the integration of technology in the classroom/learning environment.
We live in a world where technology is moving at such a fast rate it is impossible to ignore. As much as people claim to not want to use their smartphones and tablets, they do. My mother is 60 years old and she knows how to work her iPhone better than some of the students in my class. The fact is that technology has a place in our everyday lives. Companies use technology daily to do whatever it is they do. Imagine a life without traffic lights think of the chaos it will cause.
I think it is good to have a balance, children should be exposed to the educational uses of technology such as iPads and Kindles but they also need to be aware that they do not have to depend on these devices to gain knowledge. Nowadays kids we google everything, I remember asking someone else who might know the answer and having that interaction with another person. Interacting with people and books is just as important as attaining the answer.
Children should be able to get books from the library rather than just download it or go look for a summary on spark notes. Nothing replaces the smell of a book while reading it or the feeling ] physically turning the page rather than just swiping next op a tablet. Learning to take notes in class rather than just recording everything. What if one day the power goes out and all we have are people who don't know how to work a pen and paper?
We need to create a balance between using technology all the time and learning to use the "old way" of doing things. Just like people preserve their culture and traditions, we need to preserve the basic tools used to educate. Learning will always be of relevance to us.
We live in a world where technology is moving at such a fast rate it is impossible to ignore. As much as people claim to not want to use their smartphones and tablets, they do. My mother is 60 years old and she knows how to work her iPhone better than some of the students in my class. The fact is that technology has a place in our everyday lives. Companies use technology daily to do whatever it is they do. Imagine a life without traffic lights think of the chaos it will cause.
I think it is good to have a balance, children should be exposed to the educational uses of technology such as iPads and Kindles but they also need to be aware that they do not have to depend on these devices to gain knowledge. Nowadays kids we google everything, I remember asking someone else who might know the answer and having that interaction with another person. Interacting with people and books is just as important as attaining the answer.
Children should be able to get books from the library rather than just download it or go look for a summary on spark notes. Nothing replaces the smell of a book while reading it or the feeling ] physically turning the page rather than just swiping next op a tablet. Learning to take notes in class rather than just recording everything. What if one day the power goes out and all we have are people who don't know how to work a pen and paper?
We need to create a balance between using technology all the time and learning to use the "old way" of doing things. Just like people preserve their culture and traditions, we need to preserve the basic tools used to educate. Learning will always be of relevance to us.
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