Now this is just something I’ve been thinking about, and I have yet to conclude one way or the other, but I’m thinking:

Can overuse of, and a high level of dependency on ICT equipment cripple our creative work as teachers? And will, ”doing it the easy way”, make us stupid?

I work as a teacher and on the school that i work, we have three classrooms with smartboards on the walls.

www.smartboard.com

A smartboard is an interactive whiteboard that allows you to run every computer application on a big screen, including several computer applications that are especially made for smartboard(one of these application is really cool and allows you to handle your presentations in a very visual way)

I use computers on a regular basis, so it’s easy for me to construct  good, and very visual presentations for the classes that I have. Suddenly the lightbulb in my smartboard projector decided to explode. And now I feel that maybe my lack of old school experience makes it harder for me to produce good quality teaching.

Now I’m not saying that I always use the smartboard, and always do presentations like a one way monologue. As a matter of fact I use alot of groupwork, work in pairs and so on, BUT when I want to prepare a presentation, and I don’t have the ICT equipment that I would like, it doesn’t always feel like a great lesson.

I am also starting to realize that if I don’t soon back-up all the work on my work laptop, I will have no documentation to speak of that reflect my students work, progress and level of achievement, IF something happens to my computer. And computers aren’t excactly known to work forever with absolutely no problems whatsoever.

According to wikipedia (in norwegian unfortunately; http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitalisering_av_prosesser); digitalization is the process of utilizing ICT equipment to simplify mundane tasks and procesess and making them more effective.

My argument is that simplifying tasks, will demand less of us when we are performing the tasks. So when the ICT equipment breaks down, the once easy tasks, will suddenly become not so easy. And when we are used to things being easy, we might have a problem of achieving the same quality standard of our work when things get hard…..