If you’ve heard the recent technology news stories, you’re probably thinking that you need to gather all the students in your classes and hide them away in a quiet room with no access to digital technology. No cable TV. No iPhones. No Blackberries. And heaven forbid, no computers! Certainly not computers with Internet access.

Scan this sampling of headlines, and you’ll see a frightening trend toward presenting technologies as a great evil in the classroom:

• TV ‘reduces children’s attention’ (BBC News)
• Tweet this: Rapid-fire media may confuse your moral compass (Physorg.com)
• How ’soundbite TV’ is driving children to disruption in school (Daily Mail Online)
• Is Twitter evil? (MSNBC Cosmic Log)
• What Facebook Users Share: Lower Grades (Time)

Okay, seriously, some Chicken Littles need to calm down. Contrary to the popular media’s reports, Google isn’t making us stupid, and Facebook, Twitter, and cable television are not really to blame for the woes of the classroom.

The sky is not falling. On the contrary, with resources like Twenty-Two Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom, these technologies are actually able to bring some interesting new aspects to the ways we teach students to read and write.

Instead of buying the panic, ask students to think critically about their relationship to these technologies. Try one of the following activities to get started:

• Have students think about the technologies that shape their lives by writing technology autobiographies.
• Ask students to compare their own experiences with technology to those described in the articles. Students might keep track of the leisure time they spend online (as well as offline) and compare it to the time they spend on academic activities. Encourage them to draw conclusions about the influence of digital technology on their grades.
• Assign a persuasive writing activity that asks students to respond to the issues raised in one of the articles (e.g., Does Twitter confuse your moral compass?).
• Work together to examine the research strategies described in one of the articles. Check out the number of subjects in the Facebook study, for instance. What conclusions can you draw from a pool of only 13 subjects?
• Look for the information that is not included in the articles. How were those Facebook users with lower grades chosen, for example? Since the lower-achieving students had a 3.0 to 3.5 GPA, they must have been a rather limited group.
• Have students choose an online tool that they use and write a review that describes their experiences with the tool and their recommendations for others interested in using it.
• Ask students to search for news articles that report the opposite experiences with digital technologies—that technologies are having a positive impact on student literacy in and out of the classroom. Use the Williamson Daily News article “Student uses MySpace to expose school conditions” as one example.

Tags: Facebook, Google, technology and academic success, the internet, Twitter, writing

Categories: Assignment Idea, Popular Culture, Teaching with Technology, Web 2.0
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Read All Traci Gardner