digital natives

I stumbled across this video link today and wanted to share it because I think it does a great job of highlighting some of the problems with (or potential pitfalls) of our current educational system in America. "A Vision of k-12 Students Today: " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A-ZVCjfWf8

Earlier this week I also watched a special produced by Frontline about Digital Natives: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/#. It painted a rather bleak picture of the impact that technology is having on today's youth - and did little more than allude to the potential positive impact that technology could have if used properly within an educational context.

Its no mystery that students can find education boring or outdated when educators fail to make proper use of the technologies that today's youth have grown up with - and are fully immersed in when they are outside of school. It boggles my mind however, that more than two decades after educators began crusading for more technology inclusion and more meaningful use of technology in schools that we still haven't seen the major educational revolution that was promised (at least prophesized) - most classrooms that I visit today still look like the ones that I was educated in twenty or thirty years ago - and probably look a great deal like the ones my parents were educated in fifty and sixty years ago. It further infuriates me when I hear that some schools won't allow students to bring computers or pda's to school with them - or that homework assignments (especially those that are creative in nature) can't be done with the aid of a computer. I understand the arguments that have been made for these policies (fear theft and vandalism, concern about the digital divide, etc.) - but I also see countless learning opportunities that are lost each time a student is prevented from using appropriate technology in an appropriate fashion to enable further learning.