By Dave Matlow
Staples High School Principal John Dodig held up his iPhone before a Westport Sunrise Rotary Club audience today and said it symbolized the challenges of educating the iPhone generation.
John Dodig: “what information is needed?” (CLICK TO ENLARGE) Dave Matlow for WestportNow.com
The educational goal now is not only finding information but determining how to use it to solve problems better than someone else’s solution, he said. “We need to equip our students to solve problems,” he said.
Dodig said learning has changed over the years. No longer do students attend classes to acquire information, he said.
Today, the information is readily available, but the questions are “what information is needed” and “how accurate is the information,” he said.
Dodig gave an example of watching Andy Rooney on “60 Minutes” on Sunday when the principal asked himself “how old is Rooney?”
He picked up his iPhone on the spot and entered the question. “There was the answer instantly.” (Rooney is 91.)
Another question he pondered was, “How much does Rooney get paid?”
He made the appropriate entries and said he was pleased to acquire the answer while the program was still on his TV screen. (Internet research produced this answer: an estimated $500,000 to $1,000,000 per year.)
Tying that to his point about the ease of continuous access to information, Dodig said: “The job of a good school is to provide the opportunity to acquire the information” and to help students learn if it is accurate.
“The new teacher is more of a coach,” he said. He said there are fewer “right or wrong answers today.” It’s the process of how a student arrives at the answer that is the key, he said.
