I have entered a classroom quite different from the one my mother entered as a teacher two and a half decades ago. Through much of her teaching career she was expected to teach from scripted, “canned curriculum,” lessons that I taught as an elementary student to my mother’s students when she was ill. However, as technology advances we have greater demands placed upon us as instructors to become perpetual action learners. We have the ability to compare classrooms and teachers, in addition to both student and teacher “success rates,” across countries with ease through ever-prevalent news articles and must never settle for the status quo.
In the school at which I student-teach, I meet weekly with a Professional Learning Community (PLC) to collaborate and jointly create lessons for each week. I regularly marvel at the capacity of three to transform the skeletal ideas of one. I watch thoughts I have transform into elaborate lessons and cumulative tasks which anchor entire units. Great clarity comes from the discussions which probe concepts and encourage their blossoming into fully-fleshed, student engaging activities at exceptionally faster rates than I could alone.
Similarly, while devoid of proof, Kabilan, Adlina, and Embi aver that online collaboration greatly enhances teaching and helps teachers “make the most effective curriculum and instructional decisions.” They attempt to pick up the strands of Richard Kern who tracks the significance of technology in the three primary components of English education–technology, literacy, and language teaching. Furthermore, both these pieces build upon the foundation of pedagogical uses of technology as briefly delineated in tavenia’s timeline. While I agree that online communities and professional development enhance teaching, Kabilan simply makes this claim–much as I do–without furnishing solid evidence. I support the establishment of networks like Ning and know first hand that it too greatly aids the creation of pedagogically sound units and multimodal assessments but lack the statistics to support this.