BHAG

In a few hours our faculty will embark on a journey that will never end, but hopefully reach it's destination fourteen months from now. Today we start the first of six hours of technology training over the next two days, the first sessions in a series designed to help our teachers use technology as an effective tool in instruction. That instruction will continue into the fall and throughout the next school year. It is a part of an overall strategy to integrate technology in an ubiquitous way. It is one leg of our BHAG.

Readers of Jim Collins's Good to Great are familiar with the term, but for those readers not familiar, BHAG stands for big, hairy audacious goal. Our BHAG is to be the leader of technology in education for the state of Nevada and for Lutheran schools throughout the world. While there are a lot of elements that make up that goal, perhaps the most impactful is our plan that every HS student at Faith will be provided a laptop at the start of the 2009-10 school year.

In order for us to make that commitment it is critical that our teachers have a good understanding of the power of technology to engage students and change instruction. The current crop of students we have is literally wired differently. There is at least some research that suggests that the multitasking, social networking digital kids of today have brains that function in different ways than those of a generation ago. We need to be aware of those changes and design classroom instruction that accounts for the differences.

I remember conversations as a young teacher about how Sesame Street was producing a generation of students with short attention spans and much less patience for the lecture and learn style of teaching pretty prevalent in the 70s. It sure seemed like kids had much less ability to focus. And today we can identify kids with attention deficit at earlier ages than ever. We make accommodations for those students in our classrooms. However, one of the lessons we should have learned from J.K. Rowling is that students are more than willing to devote time and attention to an activity if the content is engaging. Thanks Harry Potter.

Many of our students can text faster than I can type this blog. They can integrate video, audio, photography and other content in new and creative ways. They process information faster. We need to teach them to take all they information at there fingertips, judge its accuracy fairly, and think critically about what they information means and how it affects their lives and decision-making. It is an exciting time to be a teacher. But when hasn't it been?