Interesting One From SFGate.com that says This past year, as San Francisco school officials were dealing with budget cuts by laying off teachers and librarians and closing school libraries,
spending on city schools was increasing in another area: classroom computers.
Throughout the country, computer technology is dumbing down the academic experience, corrupting schools’ financial integrity, cheating the poor, fooling people about the job skills youngsters need for the future and furthering the illusions of state and federal education policy.
No kidding!
It’s as if this author listened in on my rants during my instructional literacy design class when I was getting my MLIS. I was shocked to learn that elementary school kids are preparing PowerPoint presentations instead of writing good old fashioned book reports or those “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essays. Then when I got a job working reference at a community college, the younger students would ask me why they had to have cites from paper resources when all they’d ever done before was search on Google. These kids know how to operate a computer but when it comes to writing a coherent sentence or giving a speech they are totally lost.
I feel like an old coot at the age of 26, railing against the use of computers in education, but I’ve come to believe that computers have NO place in elementary school education and I’m not sure if they even need to be in most junior high or high school classrooms. As this article illustrates, the money can be used far better elsewhere in the cirriculum.