Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned

I learned a lot from the videos and articles that I read and after I finished I interviewed my high school aged son. I am concerned that with so much media at children’s finger tips other skills are being lost. How do we find the balance between too much media and not enough?

One of the articles talked about how 82% of students don’t see their social networking as really writing and that they didn’t feel like it spilled into their school life. I asked my son if he thought his social networking helped to improve his writing skills for school, if it made them worse or didn’t affect them. He said that it definitely makes his skills worse. I asked him why and he said when he is chatting with his friends he uses the on line short hand (that’s not what he called it, he said he uses acronyms) so his spelling has gotten worse. So bad in fact that he will spell a word so wrong that even spell check can’t find the word. He also said that he doesn’t use capitalization and punctuation correctly. This scares me. Being a good writer is an essential tool in survival in the really world.

I know that my son has some classes that don’t use technology at all and these classes are his least favorite but he also has teachers that only use media. Too much of a good thing can back fire. One teacher only lectures and with his lecture he has power points that he posts on his web site. I love the idea that the students can go back and watch the presentation again but they are word for word what he wants the student’s notes to say. How much learning is taking place when all the student has to do is stare directly ahead and just copy down what they see in front of them? This same technique day in and day out can get really boring. There needs to be a balance between both styles of learning or you will never reach all of your students.