"If We Teach Today as We Taught Yesterday, We Rob Our Children of Tomorrow" (2010)

we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow. This seems an appropriate opening line for an issue of The Agricultural Education Magazine that focuses on using 21st century technology in the high school classroom... it seems even more appropriate considering that quote is from the father of Agricultural Education - John Dewey. To put Dr. Dewey's life in perspective let's start with his birth year (1859) and what the world looked like when he attended high school. When Dr. Dewey started high school in 1873, Jesse James was robbing trains in Missouri (1875), Alexander Graham Bell had not patented the telephone (1876), and the first public exhibition of an electric light had not occurred (1876). It is hard to imagine Dr. Dewey's high school days without the use of electricity and no practical use of telephones. Dr. Dewey was a long lived man; he lived to the age of 92 and passed away in June of 1952. In his life he saw the birth of television (1926), the first atomic explosion (1952), and he lived in the same decade that the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik (1957). The amount of technological change that Dr. Dewey experienced in his lifetime provides a context for his statement If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow. In 92 years he saw acceleration not only in the number of technological changes, but also the rate of adaptation by the general public. This trend has continued since his death and evidence indicates a continuation of this trend in the future. So what? does acceleration in technology development mean for agriculture teachers? Teachers have moved past asking if new technologies should be adopted and are busy learning new technologies. There are two major questions to consider: 1) what technologies do agriculture teachers need to learn? 2) is the fastest way to learn new technologies? 1) technology do agriculture teachers need to learn? The role technology plays in the world of agricultural education is broad and deep, and the term technology is often a broadly and poorly defined term ranging from plasma cutters to presentation software. Agricultural education promotes community based programs where programs differ from county to county and region to region. Because of the diversity in technology that is available and the diversity in agriculture programs, it is up to the agriculture teacher to decide what technology to adopt. No one knows the programmatic or community needs better than the teacher does; only the teacher can determine what technologies are worth the time and energy to learn for a specific situation. It is better to focus on the second question, What is the fastest way for teachers to master new technology? Below are a few techniques that will help the most in learning new technologies. 2) is the fastest way for teachers to master new technologies? How can agriculture teachers stay current on technologies when they are already limited on time? All have opened a new piece of technology, looked at a 200 page operator's manual, and wondered if anyone has actually read it. As the rate of technological change continues to increase at an exponential rate, we struggle to keep pace mastering new technologies. The only way this can happen is to utilize technological advancements to increase our rate of learning new technologies. are the most efficient ways for teachers to learn new technologies and stay up-to-date? How can they find new information faster? The following are a few tricks that have had the greatest influence on increasing speed in finding and learning new information. Most of us have used search engines, but how many times have we searched for information and received thousands of results, none of which were useful. …