Education week Article #2

When i read about a student like Randy Herrera, all i see are brilliant ways to get him interested in academic content. With a student like that the is almost no limit to the work he can accomplish in (and out) of the classroom. It greatly disheartens me to see his teachers do not hone in on his interests and provide him (and other students) with assignments that will spur their creativity. We are in the business of educating students, and a major part of that is inspiring, motivating, and teaching based on their interests. The classroom should not be a seperate entity to their life, they should coexist into one great sphere of learning. It kills me to hear statements like: “When I step out of school, I have a pretty high-tech life,” Herrera says. “When I step in school, I feel like I’m not me anymore. I have to jump into this whole old-fashioned thing where everything is restricted.”

In 307 i have learned we need to reach these kids, not only reach them, but relate to them. They are saturated in a lifestyle of media and technology, so the classroom should not be a separate entity. I always felt like titling a course "creative writing" was kind of trivial because that is what writing is, being creative. We should strive to be creative in every endeavor. Randy's teacher is choking the creativity out of him with her outdated curriculum.

Later in the article you can see how much Randy enjoys his taste of technology, when he is allowed to make a DVD slide show. That was a breath of air in an otherwise dusty clammed up education. Randy and so many others, need to be educated in a web 2.0 world. The world we, English 307 students, are preparing to invigorate our own classrooms with.

Sadly "In most schools, technology means students using the Internet for research, or PowerPoint for presentations, Goodstein and other experts say. In some schools, students use classroom blogs, or online journals, to post and discuss classwork or share resources...experts say it is the rare classroom that turns blogs, MP3 players, podcasting, video games, or cellphones into learning tools."

I definitely agree with the part of the article that states "By falling behind the technology curve, they argue, schools risk alienating students and miss prime opportunities to teach them how to analyze and understand their increasingly complex world." With movie making programs, blogs, and podcasts educators can relate to students. Those are the prime opportunities, we as educators have to seize, to grab these students' attention.