Technology and the President

I bought my first Mac on Saturday!! WOOHOOO!!!! (oK, thank you for sharing in my excitement.) I LOVE technology. I feel like it brings us closer and opens the door for us to access not only information, but new ways of learning that information.

I absolutely adore the use of technology in the classroom. There is something about it that draws in attention to your lesson. In my student teaching and various sub jobs, I have been fortunate enough to get to play with the smartboard. It projects your computer screen onto an interactive whiteboard so that the students (or you) can write, draw, and move images for the class. It's AMAZING and I really hope that I can use one in my own classroom soon. Actually, all I really need is a projector. I love bringing images and animation into the lesson and projecting images from the web onto the board makes it soooo much easier. Imagine having the technology to answer ANY question at ANY time in front of the class. Imagine pulling up millions of images of ANYTHING across the history of mankind in seconds. The possibilities are just mindboggling! I'm so glad that I'm a teacher in this wonderful age of technology.

However, apparently our President doesn't feel quite the same way:
"And meanwhile, you're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it's putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy."

While I agree with him in that Xboxes and Playstations aren't the most wholesome way to spend our free time, I completely disagree that information could be a distraction to us and our country. I think that this new age of Wikipedia and online information overload teachers can begin to create good researchers even earlier. We can show our students how to find true, reliable sources that support our own arguments. Maybe because President Obama doesn't know how to work these new-fangled contraptions he is a little scared of the possibilities that they hold. I, for one, can not believe that our president cannot see the benefits to new technology since he is the first President with a Facebook page...

xxOOxx