PREPARING SCHOOL GRADUATES TO INTEGRATE INTO THE WORLD OF TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES, AND GLOBALIZATION: THE ROLE OF TEACHING TECHNOLOGY AND ENGINEERING

Abstract

  Technological innovation, social and economic changes, and globalization are forcing the education system to prepare school graduates to integrate successfully into the rapidly changing world. Along with teaching basic subjects such as the humanities, languages, mathematics and science, schools should expose all students to new technologies, impart knowledge and skills to them to use these technologies effectively, and foster their motivation to integrate into the world of research and innovation in technology and engineering. Schools need also to prepare students to integrate into a world in which the vast majority of business organizations are not bureaucratic but rely instead on work teams, shared decision making and a great deal of risk-taking in the effort to compete in the global market. One of the main tools available to schools to achieve these goals is the teaching of subjects in technology and engineering as an integral part of the curriculum from kindergarten to high school. One challenge for technological education worldwide is to change what we have been teaching in the technological class. While in the past, technology education dealt with teaching subjects such as crafts, auto-mechanics or electronics, technology studies today have to focus more on developing students’ computational thinking, for example, in the context of computerized control systems and robotics. A second challenge to technological education today is to change how we teach in the technological classroom. We must move from the traditional chalk-and-board teaching method to teaching that develops students’ learning skills, for example, project-based learning. In this article, I will elaborate on these issues and present examples of the implementation of these ideas in the Israeli education system.