Use of Technology in Schools

At a family BBQ yesterday, I found myself immersed in conversation with a couple of members that are teachers.  The conversation revolved around technology for student use at school.  It was a real point of pride for these teachers to tell me that they had received funding (mostly donated privately) to invest in iPads for use in the classrooms. 

Our kids are digital natives and schools feel the pressure to align themselves with the lives our kids live outside the classroom.  Going from mostly pen and paper in the classroom, kids immerse themselves in computers, video games, hand-held devices, cell phones and digital music players at home. 

Not only are schools looking to bridge the gap between the digital and school environments, they’re also battling the undeniable fact that teachers, as digital immigrants, are less versed with today’s technologies than their students, the digital natives.  How do we adapt to ensure our kids are ready for their working lives, when we’re not entirely sure what that world will look like?

One other family member at our BBQ, tells us that the school his two daughters are attending puts the seventh graders in cyber-school two days a week.  This is not a private or independent school.  This is a normal public school in Metro Vancouver that provides all its seventh graders with MacBooks and tells them to study from home two days a week.  This took our conversation to a new level.  This goes beyond buying 10 iPads for occasional use in the classroom.  This changes the teaching model.

This news lit looks of horror across the faces of the teachers in our family.  Having taught elementary school for 38 years, my husband’s cousin chimed in with a point that took this conversation to an entirely new level – one that I didn’t expect.

He said that as humans we set ourselves apart in the social interactions we establish and the communities we are a part of.  He feels that schools play a big role in forming our next generation to be collaborative, empathetic contributors to society.  If we immerse our kids in too much technology during school hours, they may loose the ability to form those social skills to be future contributors to future communities.  He has a point.  Our kids spend so much time using technology outside of school, it begs the question – how much technology do they need to focus on inside the school? 

Voice your opinion, what do you think?