Things we don't think about, but teens do

So... I am helping the kids work on their vocabulary (don't judge me! Regardless of how we want the system to be, currently they DO need this stuff for testing!) and there is a kid that appears to be texting. I reprimand her, and she shows me that she is actually just using the dictionary on her phone... which by the way is not only faster than the dictionary, but also gave her a more meaningful definition. Really, it makes sense. Isn't one of the things that we try to teach in high school is for kids to make good use of their resources?

 I keep thinking back to the first article that we read about "digital natives". It is interesting because even though I am more of a digital native than, for instance, my parents, I am still behind the times as far as the kids are concerned. I text, I carry a cell phone, I google everything... but there are certain things that they do that wouldn't even occur to me- like using my phone as a dictionary. When we made the YouTube videos I had to enlist the help of my eleven year old son. Whenever my BlueRay player or my computer is messing up I ask my son to fix it. It is interested how even though he is so much younger than me, he is must more savvy about everything electronic.

It seems that we really need to re-program ourselves to think about these things and how kids can use the resources that are now so readily available to them. They will need those things as they grow up and become adults much more than they will need some of the tired old things that we are teaching them... at the same time, I do think that learning to do some things the old fashioned way is important. There are circumstances in which the digital technology might not be available to them, but I am not sure exactly what those circumstances would be... stay tuned.

Getting started

Last weeks readings and the links that we viewed made me think about a lot of things. It does seem curious that we are so married to education as we know it. Realistically, is there a good reason that shows from this History Channel couldn't be used to teach kids about history? Really, kids would probably retain much more from a video than they would from reading chapters out of a boring text book, or from listening to a teacher drone on... I realize that we want kids to read about the content area to improve literacy, but in many subjects there is a more efficient way to learn about things... Anyway, that is just one thought. The question is, what kind of education reform would be necessary for us to adopt a new and technologically advanced way to teach our kids? One that would gain their attention and keep it. One that would make them WANT to go to school.