Schools across the U.S. are starting to rethink the abundance of digital devices in classrooms. After pouring billions of dollars into laptops, tablets and learning apps, a growing number of schools say it is time to scale back.
It sounds like we are part of the same generation (honestly, I don’t know or care what generation that is called, I just have a feeling you were born in the 70s and grew up in the 80s and 90s)
We got to see the internet come into being little by little over the 90s and early 2000s. At the time, we weren’t kids anymore and we did just fine keeping up with the technology. And I believe it was all down to our ability to be able to think, act and do things ourselves without any outside help. We grew up in an education system that forced us to think, to read, to write and to understand using nothing but our growing brain. We didn’t have the luxury of having a device show us pretty pictures or immediately calculate something for us. There is a lot to be said for a child that grows up and learns how to just write ideas, questions, answers and thoughts on an empty piece of paper with just a pencil or a crayon.
You can mimic all that on a tablet but the the process of using a tablet is partly entertainment because at one point, you start playing with the tablet rather than in learning how to draw a picture. When you have a pencil and a blank piece of paper, you have no choice but to use your mind and put something down on the sheet.
Because I grew up with new technology and the internet, I got to appreciate it all and I started tinkering with it all. I never turned into any kind of hacker or computer wiz but over the past 20 years, I’ve learned how to use/tinker/adjust/crack/tweak Windows, MacOS and Linux systems as well as build my own PC, recover old parts, mash together parts, keep laptops alive and recover tablets and devices. All done without any technical training other than what I learned from others online. In all that time, I got to meet and see so many young people who either didn’t know, didn’t care or were just ignorant as to how a computer even worked.
It sounds like we are part of the same generation (honestly, I don’t know or care what generation that is called, I just have a feeling you were born in the 70s and grew up in the 80s and 90s)
We got to see the internet come into being little by little over the 90s and early 2000s. At the time, we weren’t kids anymore and we did just fine keeping up with the technology. And I believe it was all down to our ability to be able to think, act and do things ourselves without any outside help. We grew up in an education system that forced us to think, to read, to write and to understand using nothing but our growing brain. We didn’t have the luxury of having a device show us pretty pictures or immediately calculate something for us. There is a lot to be said for a child that grows up and learns how to just write ideas, questions, answers and thoughts on an empty piece of paper with just a pencil or a crayon.
You can mimic all that on a tablet but the the process of using a tablet is partly entertainment because at one point, you start playing with the tablet rather than in learning how to draw a picture. When you have a pencil and a blank piece of paper, you have no choice but to use your mind and put something down on the sheet.
Because I grew up with new technology and the internet, I got to appreciate it all and I started tinkering with it all. I never turned into any kind of hacker or computer wiz but over the past 20 years, I’ve learned how to use/tinker/adjust/crack/tweak Windows, MacOS and Linux systems as well as build my own PC, recover old parts, mash together parts, keep laptops alive and recover tablets and devices. All done without any technical training other than what I learned from others online. In all that time, I got to meet and see so many young people who either didn’t know, didn’t care or were just ignorant as to how a computer even worked.