I couldn't agree more with David Sharos's article from the Chicago Tribune titled "Technology: Enabling or Disabling Youth?" While he presents both sides of the issue of whether technology benefits our students or not, one argument that he does seem to stick behind is that technology is a tool. When doing my research for my thesis paper in Spring of 2005 on the effects of technology use in the English classroom, my findings all reflected that technology is only as good as the teacher/user. By incorporating technology into the curriculum, teachers embrace the real world that their students live in. However, teachers must use the technology in an enriching way to benefit the students. Sharos quotes a Director of Education as saying, "The key is about empowering kids. We like to use technology as a tool, not have kids all wrapped up in it as an escape."
During my research, I found that technology use does not always guarantee increased student achievement, for technology needs to be used in the right manner in accommodation with other teaching practices. It is a tool that current and future teachers have in their tool belts that can help motivate and engage their students.
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Yes, for sure Danielle...one issue for us now though is that kids can learn anywhere anytime now and on their own......
That makes us more and more irrelevant if we don't take their voluntary literacies (tech literacies) into account when we try to engage them in more complex literacy challenges.
And some of them are already engaged in more complex tasks on the web than we are aware of...or that school asks them to perform. This greater access and teens' greater sophistication at using that access to learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it makes some of our traditional assignments look a bit silly even. I don't even want to go there!! KES
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