“Schools need to teach children to not only live in this world but to thrive in it. Reading skills and math skills will always remain important, but we must also focus on problem-solving and expose our children to the technology that they will rely on in this ever-changing world.”

            If I could I would copy and paste about twenty quotes from the website that I found off of Google Reader. They support my ongoing thesis with every sentence that has been written. This of course doesn’t make the issue of writing about it very hard, but I do have to find a way to bring Christensen into the whole mix. I want to stick to Chapter 3 because that is what interested me most. Let’s try out Essay’s With An Attitude because I liked this section, and because it seems like it would be a little bit more challenging to tie into the technology world. The article online goes into depth about how students now are able to access news, articles, everything they can think of with the click of a mouse. Okay so we can say that students who have access to the internet at school, or at home, can look up endless information for research. I flipped open to page 68 in Christensen and did a quick re-read. Christensen talks about how she doesn’t teach introductions anymore. The problem was the kids didn’t have enough evidence to back up their opening which took so much of their time. Instead the kids write about an issue that peaks their interest, and are told to back it up with evidence, with examples. Say one of your students wants to write about a serious issue like rape or gang violence because it really hits home for them. Hopefully they don’t have a personal example; if they do, let them use it, if they don’t, get some examples. They go to Google, cnn.com, anything, and within a matter of minutes they have multiple examples. Is this possible in the library? Well I guess it is if there are computers in that library. What I’m trying to get at here is technology, which is not just social networking but everything from the internet to the iPod, changes the way kids write today. Educators need not only to teach math, science, and English, but technology as well. It is the future of all subjects. Math is done on computers now instead of calculators, scientific research, well, I don’t know anything about science but I mean come on, its science, I’m sure that’s on computers now too, and English (writing) moves deeper into the web everyday with newspapers switching over to websites, and blogs are popping up everywhere. We cannot allow our students to fall behind the movement that is technology, and as long as there is a computer handy, a teacher should be able to blend the two in some form or way. We just proved that we could do it with essays with attitude didn’t we?

Source: Google News: postcrecent.com

Author: KathyWalsh Nufer 

Title: Education Advisory Panel: Technology can be Blessing and Curse

Link: http://www.postcrescent.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071023/APC06/710230595/1036