Reflective Teaching - 30 Day Challenge Day 28

Two days to go! Wahoo! While I have learned a lot from this challenge and really enjoyed writing and reading others' writing, blogging every day has been, well, a challenge. I am proud of myself and my fellow challenge participants for making it this far and look forward to seeing what challenge lies ahead in Connected Educator month (aka October); maybe it won't be every day...

On to today's prompt.

vs.

Should technology drive the curriculum or vice versa?

To me this is a little bit of a chicken or the egg question. With the speed at which technology is evolving, it stands to reason that there will be advances that will inevitably guide what we teach. At the same time, technology should rarely be the why behind your teaching (obviously there are exceptions, such as when you are teaching basic computer skills, coding or even internet safety); this should be left for the bigger thinking skills such as critical thinking, problem solving and metacognition, all of which may use technology as a tool but none of which require it. 

Of course, this also depends on your definition of curriculum. Despite the picture I used above, I believe that we need to move curriculum beyond the teaching of discrete subjects with a checklist of learning outcomes towards a more holistic, meta view of education that looks at creating life-long learners who have the skills they need to figure out what they don't know and find answers. In a world where we are teaching these skills, technology becomes a vehicle for discovery and self-exploration, for creation and self-expression, for communication and interpretation, creating a spiral effect in which curriculum is driving technology and technology is driving curriculum, each pushing the other to become more refined, more precise, more elegant. The beauty? The spiral is likely endless.