A matter of the mind...not the hard drive.

I have noticed a trend expanding over students I teach, and over their generation.  They, as a general rule, are part of a generation highly devoted to computers and cell phones, and mass-users of systems such as AIM, Facebook, Twitter and texting, MySpace, YouTube...the list goes on and on. Videos such as this infiltrate YouTube and like websites, showing statistics that often seem to affirm use of technologies and our dependence on them.  I sometimes question whether technology is truly helping us, or whether our independence and true potential are impacted more than we will ever know.

I will say, at this point, that I am very technology-dependent.  At school, I have every technology I could possibly want at my disposal.  Laptop carts that wheel into my classroom; a document camera to show students papers on the Promethean SmartBoard, located at the front of my room; the laptop dock I can use at any time to hook to the projector protruding from the drop ceiling of my room; the blogs, the Moodles, the widgets, the Wikis, the clicker system I can choose to use (but haven't yet) at any time...the list could go on.  In our world today, these technologies make kids excited to learn, and more apt to pay attention.  They also offer opportunities to interact with technology that they wouldn't have had otherwise; these opportunities most definitely prepare students for the 21st century and many technology-based skills they will need to know for the future.  I am a huge proponent for accessible technology for students, as I know first-hand how important it is for their future (see video if you disagree).

If I'm being honest, though, I think that technology allows us to become lazy.  Sure, I depend on technology now, and maybe I have gotten a little bit lazy, too.  But, I had my time in school to learn the basics.  Am I harming my students more than helping them if I don't teach them those skills (grammar, writing, self-motivation) before exposing them to multiple avenues of technology?

My students and I had a conversation about this; many don't seem to mind the fact that computers might take over and be able to compute things that the human brain cannot, thereby making the human brain (in a computation capacity, anyway) basically an unnecessary object.  Some even went as far as saying that in the future, we won't need to understand things like punctuation, because the computer will just do it for us.  This makes me so nervous.  No one should be totally dependent on an object that can "think" and "understand" more than the human brain.

I want so much for the kids I teach.  In just three weeks, I see so much potential in all of them!  I want them to have access to technology, and to be ready to compete on the world stage.  But, I also want them to understand that computers are not ruling our world now; currently, we still rule computers, and I want my students to be at the forefront, if that is their desire.  I want them to know what they know, and use technology as a tool, rather than as the only source of information or a crutch to lean on (or worse, a distraction that leads to brain-numbness).  Technology should help us become more intelligent and more well-informed.  It should not be used too often or in ways that impede us from knowledge.

I have been given a gift in my educational lifetime.  The gift of doing things the hard way.  Writing papers without the benefit of spell check; writing draft after draft by hand, thereby improving my penmanship and printing; finally learning every grammar rule from two amazing and firm women, Mrs. Forgrave, my 12th grade English teacher, who taught me how to use a comma correctly and every other grammar rule I now know inately, and Dr. Shaeffer from Millersville University, who spent the first two weeks of my English Composition class having her students conjugate every tense of the verb "to be."  That very same professor made her students write correction sheets explaining every error they made in writing and correcting them (and correcting them again, if they corrected them incorrectly).  I got a B- in that class, as an English major; I hated every second of those classes, but I will never forget the lesson (or the tenses) it taught me.  "It's hard, but in the long run, it's worth it."  What a lesson to learn...  It's time to pay it forward!