Discussion Group 1
Please comment on Phuc and Emily’s statements during the Great Debate. Do you agree with either of them? Neither? Where do you fall on the continuum of technology integration? What benefits does technology offer students and faculty at school? What do we sacrifice in order to bring new technologies into our classrooms?
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good points – thanks. I’m intrigued by “teens don’t distinguish between on- and off-line.” since my background concern always is “what happens when someone pulls the plug?” I want to be sure that we are teaching kids to function well in both worlds AND to distinguish.
And what does “pulled the plug” even mean to a teenager?
do you mean, can a teen imagine a world without electricity – as a real possibility, not as an historic
fact? if that’s the case we have a huge task!
And what is reality to a teen?
a misunderstanding of how to effectively use technology for a given goal could lead to confusion.
I think that once again the most important thing to do is to look at the goals of what it is we are trying to do – If the goals are best reached with the use of digital technology then use it, if the goals would be hindered by that use, prohibit it. We have goals that include learning how to use technology well – we have other goals that have nothing to do with technology. It is not either/or.
And those goals are…?
I am for intelligent and constructive use of technology in school. Like a protractor, a calculator. For language on-line news feeds and AV sources are incredibly important for LISTENING skills; there are four other language skills to cover. I love on-line review/reinforcement tools. Literature, dictionaries are vital for reading/writing/critical thinking. But woe betide the day when we give up face to face communication with all the facial and gestural meanings they bring.
additional quandary for me: are computers multi-sensory?
Well, they use sound and vision. It is still, however, a two-dimensional world. It begs the question of what a student learns from being in the woods. What would Henry Thoreau think?
a person speaking in person is sound and visuals – and, perhaps smell …..
the woods are all senses.
yes?
This is the place to consider,that asking kids to do hard things and then stand there with them is most important for the future.
The most compelling point from Emily is the Israeli study where students with technology actually began to be drawn to book sources.
An important goal, normalize something that appears greater than it may be but technology provides a very quick escape is important and can lose the grit.
hmmmm…. I obviously “like” technology; I obviously think it is “useful,” an “important thing to be familiar with.”
At the same time, I am not comfy with the connection between technology and economic status. Isaac Newton was born poor, but because he was such a brainiac a local noble sponsored him at oxford. the rest is history. But what about today? What if Isaac were born poor, in rural America, without a computer? By the time he would be ready to attend college, he would be pretty deficient in the “technological skills” needed to do well at college. Even if he was given a full schoalrship to college, do you think he would invent physics in that context? Maybe. I think he wouldn’t be taken seriously because he didn’t have a facebook or twitter account.
A major question has to be why we think that recent advances in technology are fundamentally different than previous ones. For example, who would have said we should not use electric typewriters? Obviously word processing doesn’t help one with cursive writing, but it does help tremendously with drafting.
Yes, but does anyone still have their fondue pots from the seventies?
I do. Also a crock pot.
I do not believe computers are multisensory. The fingers move not the body.
What if you type while on a treadmill?
But what about those other senses – olfactory, tactile, the negotiation of meaning in real-time dialogue?
One of the best points has to do with the difference between USA Today and The Times – How can we best teach students to evaluate each?
Isn’t this question more about what is quality?
That is my point – evaluation has to do with finding quality
But USA Today also is distributed widely to hotels, motels, as freebies. Does that contribute to higher readership?
More often than not, balance is the answer. As a teaching tool technology should serve the needs of convenience and facilitating engagement and not exclusion. As a learning tool, we should understand why we would want the convenience of technology by first learning conventional methods. Often we do not learn to use calculators before knowing how to perform their functions manually.