Emails to David 2: Teaching and the Digital Literacy

David is our new and quite excellent Director of Educational Technology. Igor is the king of all hardware and software. I am the old teacher who recognizes that digital literacy may be harder for me . . . . This is the second of three letters.

Dear David:

I have found that one of my more difficult dilemmas in planning curriculum is how to choose from everything I might choose from. How do I create a reader in Econ from the enormous amount of reading I've done? How do I narrow it down? Even with good criteria, I'm left with too much and I have to cull and cull again. Same thing happens in any history class, less so in English, but there, too. And, of course, my reading generates not just reading assignment ideas, but project ideas and different ideas for Greg-centric or Student-centric lesson plans.

And this is just a matter of trying to choose among things I've read with a smattering of movies, videoes, podcasts thrown in.

How much more difficult will it be then, i.e., how much more time consuming will planning be if I add the capabilities and resources made available by digital tools? The prospect is a bit overwhelming! And that's just the prospect!

Now, it will seem less overwhelming to those for whom digital tools do not present other media, alternative media, i.e., people for whom digital tools exist seamlessly with . . . books and periodicals. It will seem less overwhelming to those for whom the technical proficiency already exists or at least the intuition exists which is necessary to develop the proficiency soon. So for someone like me, I really do have to make adjustments while the plane is flying.

Fortunately, the plane is not going down. No emergency here. But the plane IS going, as I see it, smoothly. I am certainly willing to risk some turbulence. And it may very be that kids in the near future will regard my classroom as a plane that can't get off the ground due to some old fashioned pedagogy if I don't learn to use the tech. Nonetheless, I do fear that I won't develop the intuition and that proficiency will always be beyond my grasp as new iterations of the digital tools keep racing to market. And I'm concerned about being even more overwhelmed by choices.