This morning I read about young people becoming sleep deprived (The Age:High-Tech link to teen sleep, health) the cause mentioned was technology. Many teenagers have computers and mobiles in their rooms now and spend a lot of their evening time social networking. I thought at the time, perhaps if there was more technology at school, they wouldn’t need to spend so much time using their toys when they should be sleeping.

I remember a couple of years ago I had a student who was up all night playing a game online. It took me a lot of time to work this out. He didn’t do very well at school, but at night, apparently he was enjoying some success and was a bit of a legend at the game. We discussed this with his mum who had no real idea what went on online. He was as disengaged with home as he was with school.

I’ve had many conversations with students about their online usage. I find it interesting. They are really competent and usually when I want to do something online and I don’t know how, I can find a student to teach me. They tell me how boring their classroom experiences are and how they are in a daze in class sometimes and wish they had more time on their computers. So they steal the time from sleep. This is really unhealthy.

We are starting to get more computers in our classrooms now. This is presenting challenges. Even the teachers who know how to use technology don’t always know how to effectively integrate it into their classrooms. I have personally become disengaged with trying to use technology in my classes because of the unreliability of the computers in the past and the limitations to access. A couple of years ago I was full of ideas and trying all kinds of things but it was just too frustrating. Now I have to revisit that but I’m finding it difficult to be honest.

There are many teachers at my school who are not using technology very much at all. They are limited in their understanding or interest in web 2.0 type learning. They feel technological if they use a powerpoint and read it out. I feel the gap is too wide. Today we had a staff day and I was feeling an amount of frustration at speaker after speaker using this technique. I was thinking if they don’t have better skills and put more effort into presentations for the whole staff meeting, it’s certainly not going to happen in the classroom.

When I got home my son was working on one of his blogs and he asked me for help. He was so fast in his chopping and changing through websites and picking up code and pasting it, I had to tell him to slow down if he wants me to help. It further dawned on me how wide the gap is.

Introducing technology in the classroom is a big new adventure. I feel I am about to learn a lot.

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