By Albert Pimienta

Speed. That is what I think of when I think of technology, its emergence as a necessary instructional tool and its prominent place in our daily lives. I am thinking not of the speed with which computers or mobile devices search and pull information, but rather the speed with which we, as educators, must embrace the technologies and change the way we teach and the literacies we teach. The article, “Writing Visually: YouTube, New Media Literacy, and the College Admissions Race” mentions that students today are creating YouTube style videos as part of their college admissions applications. While the students must surely have media literacy skills to create effective and convincing videos, my thoughts turn to the evaluators who must also be media literate in order to evaluate the digital submissions fairly and objectively.

In recent years, we have seen the explosion of communication technologies such as mobile devices, social networking sites, wikis, blogs, Facebook, Twitter. Our vocabulary has expanded to include words and phrases such as viral marketing, flash mobs, sexting, and many others. It is dizzying how fast technology changes and how fast it changes the ways we create content and organize and share information. The article, “The Young and the Digital in 2010; Studying the Mini-Generational and Participation Gaps,” asserts that young people today are “always on…always connected to a device and their peers…” So, one question comes to mind: Can we, as educators, ever catch up? We may use digital tools, but most of our students are digital natives. Will the teacher ever be able to move comfortably in the digital environment and teach the requisite media and information literacies that our students need to be digital citizens?

As new digital technologies are invented and become part of our students’ daily school and home lives, we must adapt and learn these new tools. We must also become adept at not only using these tools, but understanding the ethical use of these tools, and that inappropriate technology usage or behavior has ramifications. In their article “Five Considerations for Digital Age Leaders: What Principals and District Administrators Need to Know about Tech Integration Today,” Lotta Larson, Teresa Miller, and Mike Ribbie write that “teacher leaders have to take personal responsibility for understanding changes in tech implementation and integration…rather than simply relying on technology support staff.” As educators, we have to gain the technology skills ourselves so we can teach the new literacies.