Thing #5

As someone who personally loves new things, I am a little indifferent about the emerging technology resources. I will say on one hand, the new technological advances that have been made in the world of education are mind blowing. Teachers and students from around the world can now be connected, allowing the young generation of students to be introduced to a new world that's beyond their backyard. The amount of information that is available to them seems to be endless. Students are introduced to things they never even dreamed of with just the click of a mouse.
On the other hand, I agree with what a fellow student of mine said, that technology might be driving some of the important lessons that young students need to learn. Instead of grabbing a book off of the shelf and reading it and using their imaginations to bring it to life, they can easily find the important things in the book and skip over some of the best parts of reading the whole story. In a way, technology makes the youth a bit more lazy. Take smartboards, for example. I am an "old school" kind of person. In my ideal classroom, I want a big, long whiteboard and an Expo marker. Smartboards, as awesome as they may be, seem to make things slightly more complicated on certain occasions. They have to be calibrated, and some sort of computer is needed for them to work. With a whiteboard, you just need a marker and an eraser and some good handwriting. =) And if you don't have that, a whiteboard is a good tool for practice.