I was checking out the Peoria Public School District 150 website, and I came across a link that said simply “Technology.” I thought it looked intriguing, so I clicked on it and came across a plethora of internet links for students and teachers. The most curious one was labeled “Internet Every Day.” This links to another page on the school district website that includes this introduction:
As a classroom teacher with 5 computers and a new “attachment” to the wide area network and the World Wide Web, I want to see my students engaged in meaningful use of these resources. I have researched numerous sites that I feel would be useful for my students to access on a daily basis and also resources for teachers to use for their daily tasks. Try as many of these sites as you like and see what you think.
After this are several links to “sites for kids” and “sites for teachers.” The sites for kids include “Time.com for Kids,” “Yahooligans! News, Jokes, and Sports,” “Brainteasers,” “EduPuppy,” and several others.
This is ridiculous. First of all, when did using the internet become a basic skill right up there with readin’, ‘ritin’, and ‘rithmetic? Using the internet is not that difficult, folks. You don’t have to do it every day of your school year to figure it out. I never even had the internet until I was past college age and I picked it up without any trouble. My parents are in their late fifties/early sixties and they use it. So don’t tell me this is a life skill that kids need to learn early or they’ll just never make it in the real world If I want to learn more about tv and internet packages then I can do so pretty quick.
As far as using the content of the internet for educational purposes, I think it’s a waste of money. There’s great cost in wiring schools for internet access and purchasing computers and paying network administrators to keep it all humming, and for what? I’ve clicked on many of the links on the “Internet Every Day” page, and they’re nothing that needs to be done on a computer. For example:
- Brainteasers: I used to do brainteasers in school — they used to call them “story problems,” and the teacher handed them out on a piece of paper. This gave me the added benefit of being able to work out the math on the paper itself so the teacher could see how I came up with my answer, not just whether or not I got the right answer.
- Word of the Day: We used to call these “vocabulary tests.” We’d have a list of words for which we needed to know each spelling and definition. Another way we got a “word of the day” was by reading books. When we came across a word we didn’t know, we’d look it up in the dictionary (that’s a book filled with “words of the day” and their definitions).
- Yahooligans! News: We read the newspaper — they still publish these today.
- Ask Jeeves: We used a set of books called an “encyclopedia.” The World Book encyclopedia was especially kid-friendly, with well-written but easy-to-understand entries and lots of pictures and diagrams. Some entries even had little science projects you could do! For really complicated questions, you might have to go to the library and look up more information in books.
- A Game A Day: We used to play games with each other instead of with a computer. Board games often required skills like counting, making change, or memorization. Outdoor games required strategy and physical agility. Playing outside instead of on the computer would go a long way toward keeping kids from getting fat, too.
Certainly none of these internet sites warrant visiting them every day. Besides their questionable value, there’s also the issue of advertising on several of the sites and the effect that can have on children.
U.S. students are not lagging behind other countries like Germany and Japan because they don’t know how to use Google. We’ve got them beat on that front. If you really want to teach the kids something, have them take the computer apart and put it back together. Then at least they would be learning something about electricity and the properties of certain metals. They may even get interested in engineering or chemistry as a result.