Saturday, June 29, 2013

Legacy apps and legacy systems

Another session I attended at ISTE 2013 that made me think was Chris Lehmann's session entitled Technology Transforms Pedagogy.  At one point he talked about the things he taught in his English class long after they were necessary for students to learn - for example HTML4 - and asked "What are your legacy apps?  What are the things you are still teaching that are no longer relevant?"  I started to think about keyboarding.  A parent of a new 5th Grade student recently asked me if/when we were teaching it.  We do actually introduce the Typing Club in Grade 2, but I'm wondering how useful this is long-term for our students.  Is keyboarding something that has reached its expiry date?  He then asked us to think about how we would end this sentence:
Technology means that I have to let go of .....
The next question we started thinking about was legacy systems.  Examples could be the way we communicate with parents, professional development models, curriculum, class schedules, grading, assessment and administration.  Are these now legacy systems - do we continue to do these in the same way without questioning their relvance to our students' futures?  Which of these could we change or control, and what could we do?  And how could technology make that change happen?

Photo Credit: onkel_wart (thomas lieser - computer dead) via Compfight cc

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