Pencil, O pencil, where art thou and how much do you charge?

“Pencil, O pencil, where art thou?

I have to agree, my fellow colleagues (Mac http://djmastayoda.edublogs.org/ and Elyse http://elyse84.edublogs.org/) were spot on about the pencil fairy tale. Other than being a fantastic resource that I will show my students when writing fairy tales, it makes an amazing correlation between the advent of the pencil, the resistance to change, the phenomena of invention, the exclusivity of invention and the accessibility of new invention, as well as the resources need to apply invention.

I can still remember my high school commerce class in 1998, where my teacher said, “back when I was at school, my teacher made the bold prediction that in 20 years time, all students will have their very own calculator. We all laughed, and said, ‘yeah, sure.’”

I remember laughing and thinking that it was ludicrous to think that no one would have access to a calculator. After all, it was the only way I ever understood mathematics, and my sanity relied upon it.

The same thing is happening with ICT. Students now type faster than any secretary could, and live, eat and breathe the internet. Why is it then, that many teachers don’t embrace it and try to get training and encourage the school to invest in more ICT? Is it a matter of funding? Is it a matter of time?

What the moral of this fairy tale is, is that we need more teachers to be trained in terms of resources and application, so that a necessity like ICT can be incorporated and used the way it’s intended to.

In staffrooms, the complaint is that there is a lack of funding, and time to train teachers on how to use resources like smartboards, interactive whiteboards, power points, etc.

As teachers, should we sit around and wait for the schools to train us in digital technology, or should we go out there and get training and thank heavens for tax claims?