For my first blog, I would like to compare Anya Kamenetz’s article The Real Smart Phone Revolution with Cara Bafile’s article Fifth Graders Soar into the Blogosphere. The focus I would like to discuss is the idea of students interacting with each other as well as their teacher on the internet.
To give a brief overview of Bafile’s article, she explores the effects that blogging some assignments on the internet are having on 5th grade teacher Gillian Ryan's classroom dynamics. In the article, she explains not only how Ryan has implemented blogging into her curriculum, how it has altered the class’ attitude towards assignments as well as how introducing blogging helped turn one student around from doing no work in class to being a productive participant.
The idea from the Smartphone article to which I would like to compare is where Kamenetz quotes Richard Rowe as saying “most communications were hub-and-spoke, one to many. The internet is a many to many environment.” Ryan couldn’t agree more and feels that switching to a many to many environment is a good thing. She says when she asks her class to write a blog that “I’m not simply asking them to write a response to me on a piece of paper, I'm asking them to share what they learn with the world. It makes what I ask them to do a real-world task.” This makes sense to me. I mean, if students didn’t like to share with others, would we have such things as Twitter and Facebook?
Both statements from Ryan and Rowe are go hand in hand in the idea that education is moving from a local one on one with a teacher or with fellow students to becoming a world wide effort and the children couldn’t be happier. It says to me that the children are loving the fact that now their ideas are in a place where they can be viewed by anyone at anytime and because of faceless ability of blogging, more emphasis can be placed on what is being said as opposed to who is saying it. This makes it possible for students who are normally ignored by those older than them to be taken more seriously. Because of this, students are no longer competing for gold stars or smiley faces; they are competing for recognition within the real world.
This is well written. However, I am afraid that children are going to lose social skills, if they do not interact face to face with the teacher, and their peers. They can hind behind a wall of false security via Facebook and blogs, and express themselves without fear of criticism, or put downs. Not only this, but using computers and typing via word-processing, we risk the loss of actual writing skills and proper spelling.
ReplyDeleteTaking technology into the classroom is a must however, but I think that it needs to be gradual, and not as drastic as this article makes it out to be. A slow movement would be more beneficial, and allow room for studies to actually take place to make sure these learning devices are as effective as they make them out to be.