Chapter 5: the digital invasion!

Throughout this entire chapter I just kept asking myself: “What will the students loose by using all of these interactive computer programs?” Sure, interactive websites and programs that allow your students to virtually tour Africa or the human body but are there things that are lost? I feel that some of these programs trade actual experience for accessibility. If there is a dinosaur exhibit at the local museum, I would much rather take my students to the museum so they physically see everything rather than experience it through a computer screen. On the other hand, touring Africa through the computer (seeing as you can’t really take a class to Africa) seems to me, better than reading about Africa out of a textbook. I think that digital media and everything it entails does have it’s place in educational instruction, but when it becomes an easy way out for lazy teachers, I think the students miss out on a lot.


Computer and Web based training seem like they are the next new trend in business and education. I don’t think that enough people realize the benefits of being trained one-on-one with another human, though. You can’t ask a computer a detailed question, you would have to search FAQ and if your question has several parts that could take quite a while. And what if FAQ and the Help function don’t have the answer to your question? You have to call the customer service hotline for said software or website and try to find someone who can help you. It seems to me that if you want your students or your workers trained right, you would ask someone who knows their job well to help instruct them, not sit them down in front of a computer. This world seems to be loosing it’s ties with person to person interaction: cell phones, laptops, instant messages, text messages, e-mail -- all of these things that help us maintain in contact with people without ever having to see them. Social interaction is crucial to student development, if all the teacher does is plop the student down in front of a computer and expect them to learn everything they need to learn, the teacher is useless. Teachers are needed to personally guide students through the journey of learning, something that I don’t feel computers are able to do.


I think that using virtual tours to expose students to far away places that they may never have physical access to is great, and I plan on using such tools in my classroom. I will not use such tools to show students things that they can go out and see for themselves (I plan on teaching in south Florida, and I would take my students to the Henry Morrison Flager Museum so they could actually see everything rather than simply show them the virtual tour online). Another thing I really plan on implementing in my classroom is electronic reference programs, such as Encarta. I remember using Encarta when I was in elementary school and I loved the pictures, audio, video and such that Encarta had available. I haven’t looked at the program in several years, I’m sure that it covers so much more material now. I think that students can learn well from such software because it appeals to many different learning styles, as does most digital media. Lastly I think that tutorial software can be beneficial to non-English speaking students as well as students who are not reading or comprehending at their grade level (I want to teach high school English/Language Arts so all the math/science software is quite irrelevant to me). I would only use tutorials as tutorials though, I believe that the teacher should do the instructing and the software and digital media should be used to reinforce what the teacher wants the students to learn.