Regular updates and musings on curriculum and technology in the Salisbury Township School District in Allentown, PA.
Teenagers and the Internet
With the title, “What’s the matter with kids today?: Nothing, actually. Aside from our panic that the Internet is melting their brains,” Salon.com writer Amy Goldwasser offers a brief article that prompts us to rethink our ideas about how and why students are different today.
Teenagers today read and write for fun; it’s part of their social lives. We need to start celebrating this unprecedented surge, incorporating it as an educational tool instead of meeting it with punishing pop quizzes and suspicion.
We need to start trusting our kids to communicate as they will online—even when that comes with the risk that they’ll spill the family secrets or campaign for a candidate who’s not ours.
This article made me think about how we still want our students to consume more than create. When we allow kids to create, we give them more control. This can be scary for us! But the nature of information, and therefore knowledge, has changed. As adults, are we working from a narrow definition of literacy that may not encompass the changes being experienced outside of school? What do you think? This is valuable for us to reflect on as we move full steam ahead on our literacy/technology initiative. Feel free to leave your comments below!
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