Monday, December 21, 2009

What are we teaching?

In fact, one of the saddest but most common conditions in elementary school computer labs (when they exist in the developing world), is the children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing,not running office automation tools."

---Nicholas Negroponte, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab (2007)


I'm glad to see others have seen this and it's not just me - and it is still going on.

My question is

How do we stop teachers using "computer time" to write up the good copy of their story and moving them to the student to creating a multimedia storybook/glog/video.

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1 comment:

Mrs. Tenkely said...

I hadn't seen this quote before. How true it is. I am always disappointed when the focus is on the tool and not the learning. Technology needs to be used to engage, excite, and inspire. The problem is shallow projects with shallow goals. Our students want to share more with us, they want to wow us, they want to be creative.