Pedagogy Before Technology

Students belonging to Generation Alpha, born since 2010, have very different views of technology than someone my age. Belonging to the Xennial micro-generation, born between 1977 and 1983, has grown up with an entirely different relationship with technology. I experienced the rise of the internet and technology in its earliest, developing years. We had floppy disks and played Oregon Trail on huge desktop computers in the school’s computer lab. We played simple video games on the Atari, and graduated to the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Mario Bros. as young children. We were introduced to social media in its formative years, creating MySpace profiles with delicate care and attention to detail. There was no video and very little photo evidence of our embarrassing moments, and we were excited to get our first pagers and cell phones in college. Xennials grew up synchronously with technology’s rapid growth. I learned the new technology as it was introduced, so this small group of Generation X - Millennial crossovers simultaneously knows what it is like to have and not have technology. In contrast, Generation Alpha has always known technology and was born into a fully digital world. They save their digital information on the cloud and prefer Snapchat for connecting with friends and even people across the world whom they have never met. They play a wide variety of video games with advanced graphics on the Xbox or PlayStation 5. Generation Alpha documents everything, storing vast amounts of photos and videos that they then post on social media for all the world to see. According to the Marist List, “They have grown up with Big Data and ubiquitous algorithms that know what they want before they do” (2019).

These two generations are a contrast of privacy and full transparency. It is a juxtaposition of two dramatically different transitions from childhood to adulthood. While Generation X grew almost to adulthood without much technology and Generation Alpha has never known a world without technology, my generation fell somewhere between, and this provides a unique perspective on the role of technology in our lives and education. The difference is significant and critical to understand in our roles as teachers and librarians. Knowing that technology is essential to the current generation of students helps us to understand the role it can play in the classroom. Technology can increase student engagement and help to address higher-order thinking skills following Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. For example, to achieve the highest Bloom’s level of “Create”, students can blog, program, code, or create a podcast (Common Sense Education). Technology enhances the opportunities and opens the door to so many variations of producing new and original work. In a digital world, educators should be utilizing the available technology to reach students and enhance their learning at high levels. 

An important consideration when selecting technology tools for learning is the Bloom’s verb at which we want students to operate. If we are looking to have students create, commenting on a blog post is not going to achieve the desired result. We would want to have students creating their own, original blog posts and perhaps collaborating with a group of students to do so. This moves from Evaluate to Create and achieves a higher-order thinking level (Churches, 2008). Technology can also be a foundation upon which we design learning if the goal is to teach the technology itself. Thus, as educators, we must consider our goal for using a particular technology application. If we know the intended outcome, we can use Bloom’s verbs to select the most appropriate technology tool. If we know the technology tool we would like to use, the tool drives the learning, and we can select the most appropriate Bloom’s level for students based on their experience. 

For librarians in particular, technology has been a part of the role since the late 1990s when another radical change in education placed importance on teaching 21st-century skills to develop students into lifelong learners (Wine, 2016). This expectation has grown throughout the years, but current trends are moving the technology piece to the role of the “instructional technology specialist (Wine, 2016). This still requires the school librarian to collaborate closely with the technology specialist, which is why education in the area of educational technology is critical for librarians. Librarians may focus more on information literacy skills, but they still need to integrate technology into these lessons to enhance the learning and capture today’s students. Without a firm grasp of the technology tools that are available, we lose out on so many great opportunities to elevate student learning. School librarians must strive to keep up-to-date on educational technology even as the role of instructional technology specialists becomes more common on campuses. 

The educational technology landscape is ever-changing and always evolving, and educators must continually adapt to keep up. That is not an easy task. As soon as we become experts in one form of technology, the next new thing comes out, and we find ourselves behind again. However, it is the students who need to be using this new technology. We are merely the facilitator guiding their learning and use of technology applications. For example, as Artificial Intelligence has become more commonplace, teachers need only know the basics of where to implement its use and a general understanding of how it works. The experts are in the room, allowing students to explore and figure out the details and mechanisms of using AI. We simply provide the opportunity to experience such technology. Educators should not feel obligated to be an expert before utilizing the technology, otherwise, it will be obsolete before we ever get around to implementing it into our instruction. Learn enough and then let students do the rest of the work. They just might teach you more than you ever thought you would know! 

References

Churches, A. (2008). Bloom's Digital Technology. Research Gate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228381038_Bloom's_Digital_Taxonomy 

[Common Sense Education]. (n.d.). Bloom's Digital Taxonomy [Video]. Common Sense Education. https://www.commonsense.org/education/videos/blooms-digital-taxonomy

(2019, August 21). The first Marist Mindset List is released. Marist University. Retrieved June 4, 2025, from https://www.marist.edu/w/marist-news-the-first-marist-mindset-list-is-released 

Wine, L. D. (2016). School librarians as technology leaders: An evolution in practice. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 57(2), 207–220.