The digital world our kids to live in
Take a second and look at the list below. What do each of these have in common?
Cell phones
Smart phones
iPod
Chat
Text messaging
Twitter
Facebook
E-mail
Perhaps you said these were all digital. Or that they are all customized and individualized. You may have said these are all things that kids use. Or you may have said these are all things that are used in businesses today as tools. All of those would have been correct, but they weren’t what I was looking for.
The thing I’ve noticed that they all have in common is that each of these is banned in the vast majority of our schools. Wouldn’t you think that the tools that are used daily in our kids lives, and are also used as business tools, would be utilized equally effectively in our schools?
When I talk to faculties of high schools they are adamant that these items should never be used in school. And in fact, they identified them as huge distractions to student learning. My question to the staff members is, “who is responsible for teaching kids to write multipage research papers?” Typically, several hands go up. Usually they are members of the social studies department, or the English department, or the science department, or a combination of all of these.
But when I asked who was responsible for teaching kids the appropriate use of the items in the list there is never hand raised. My next question then is which of these would be most often used by our students in the real world, a multipage research paper or the items in the list above? Obviously, the items in the list will be used regularly by most, if not all, of our kids in the real world as students, and adults. They will be used both in their personal life, in their professional lives.
So why do schools refuse to incorporate these items not only asked curriculum content, but also as tools to learn the existing content? What do you think? Leave me a comment below and we’ll talk about it.
