Recently on
my RSS feed I’ve seen a couple of headlines come across that made me
think. One was “Tim Cook ‘ditched’
physical keyboard, uses iPad and iPhone 80% of the time” and the other was
“Some states preserve penmanship despite tech gains”. As I read the two articles I thought back to
my Typing class in my junior year of high school (80-81). We used typewriters in that class and were
excited that we actually had some electric versions. At that point we didn’t have a sense of what
might be coming down the road…
In 1980-81,
who would have thought that we would come to a point of:
- using word processors instead of typewriters
to create documents?
- sending many more emails than we do letters
or cards?
- texting our children and our friends more
often than we call them?
- using an RSS feed to get our daily news
rather than the paper newspaper? (I admit that we still get the Sunday paper at
home but it is mainly for the sale papers…and now for many of those “there is
an app for that”).
When
students who are currently seniors in high school were in third grade
(2003-2004), the iPhone was still three years away, iTunes was just being
launched, and the fifth Harry Potter book was released. Now we are on the iPhone 5, iTunes has
expanded into music, movies, books and more and all of the Harry Potter movies
have been seen by millions.
Our current
3rd grade students will graduate from high school in June,
2022. At that point who knows how they
will be capturing and sending information.
Will they still use cursive at all?
Will home row typing as we currently know it be on its way out in favor
of “thumb-typing”? Will tools like Siri
make most sharing voice-activated?
I don’t know
the answer to these questions, but there is one thing I do know. We need to make sure we don’t restrict the
potential opportunities for our students because of how we learned or how we
did things in the past. If we did, we
might be considering implementing 1:1 electric typewriters rather than 1:1
iPads.
There is a
quote I keep on my desk by Alan Kay that says “The best way to predict the
future is to invent it.” It is our job
as educators to continue to invent the future for our students.
