“In my day, students had to write with quill pens on vellum using ink that they’d mixed themselves. For math, if you couldn’t do it on an abacus, then you were on your own.” –Professor Meriwether Q. Curmudgeon
It seems to me that with every new shift in technology, we find early enthusiasts who believe that this advance is the great master key that will, once and for all, smooth the path to student learning, usher in the millennium, and guarantee all of us a good parking spot. On the other hand, there are the eternal naysayers who believe that with this technological change, humanity will pass over the event horizon of its doom. Somehow I feel confident that somebody in Homer’s day sat back clucking at the demise of language with the scandalous advent of written vowels.
Every once in a while, I hear non-teaching friends bemoan the priorities of current elementary education. “They don’t even teach the kids to write in cursive anymore!” To this, if I bothered to open my mouth, I’d say, “So what? Who writes by hand anything more significant than a grocery list?”
A teacher’s job is not to prevent adoption of technology or police its use in most cases. A teacher’s job with regards to technology, wearable or otherwise, is to help students understand how to fit this thing into their lives effectively. That’s why math has embraced the use of calculators. Real mathematicians still know how to do arithmetic by hand, but mere mortals need to learn how to avoid making bone-headed mistakes with that calculator that we know they’re going to use. Only the most Luddite writing teacher would forbid the use of spell-check, but all of us hopefully assist students in not being lulled into a false sense of security by the absence of a red squiggle under our words.
If a student in an American Literature exam can easily discover who wrote The Scarlet Letter or pull up Nikki Giovanni verse on their watch, then my challenge is to teach them things that go beyond what Google can serve up in a moment.
The focus on cheating is misplaced. If I am so lazy as to create a test than can be hacked by even something as cool as this Dick Tracy technology, then perhaps I’m the one who is cheating.