For the past few years of my life, I have been very concerned with how to reach at-risk kids, especially the minority English Language Learners I work with. I am constantly looking for and trying to come up with new ways to reach them and engage them in learning. I thought that getting a masters in Education Media Design and Technology would help me figure out some new high-tech ways of reaching kids.
In the course of my research, I ran across an article with some interesting information. The authors stated that several studies had shown that the technology used in education was not as important to at-risk students as the relationships those students had with their instructors. After thinking about it for a bit, this made perfect sense to me. The students who are most at-risk are the ones who have the most difficult home lives. They have absent, abusive, and neglectful parents. Their home environments are not very conducive to learning, which makes their school environment much more important. If they feel that they are not welcome at school or they don't see the relevance of school to their daily lives, they might seek acceptance elsewhere, like in a gang. Reading this article really opened my eyes. Instead of using the technology to focus on the newest high-tech gadgets, we should instead focus on using the technology to create meaningful relationships for those students that are so starved for direction and guidance. A teacher can come to mean so much more to them and that teacher can use all of these social networking tools to create a welcoming environment that will motivate students.
Students become excited about things because the people they look up to and care about are excited by things. If I were to look at my own experience, I can look to my parents and see how they helped form who I became as a learner. For instance, as a child I became interested in baseball because my father loves baseball. I wanted to learn about it because it was exciting to him and he transferred that excitement to me. My mother was constantly reading to me and some of my earliest memories are of how badly I wanted to learn to read because everyone else was reading. Later, I began to develop my own tastes, but these things were passed on to me because they were important to my parents and my parents are important to me. A child who is raised in a home with a less healthy relationship to his parents might develop different interests. If they can form a strong bond with a teacher, that teacher can help foster a love of learning that would be more beneficial to that child than any lecture.
Technology is not enough to address the needs of these students. You can give the poorest kid in the world the fanciest computer and it won't mean anything to him if he doesn't have someone who cares about him motivating him to use it.
Social networking is going to be one of the most important ways to address the needs of at-risk students. It is incredibly unfortunate that many educators view social networking as a distraction. It is a natural part of the developmental process for children and young adults to want create meaningful relationships. Instead of trying to block all the sites that allow them to communicate with each other, we should embrace this natural desire and use it as a way to keep the kids engaged in school. It is just the educators' responsibility to teach them to use it safely and effectively.
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