The New Breed of Learners

            The Tony Wagner article Rigor Redefined shows that many schools these days are not teaching students the basic skills need to survive the shark infested waters of the business world. How to question, communication skills and, the ability to think are all characteristics that seemed to have jumped our generation. There are many things that can be blamed for this. Technology, like Facebook, texting, and Twitter make it so we don’t need to talk to people in person any more. Although technology is only thing we can blame it on, I believe another reason is the classroom environment has become more lecturing from teachers instead of the kids talking. I think our class does an amazing job of getting everybody’s opinion into the conversation and giving everyone the option to talk. This year I have learned to learn for myself, instead of being told what to learn. Sure sometimes I was wrong, but those times I was wrong helped me learn. If you learn from your mistakes you won’t commit them again. After looking through the seven characteristics a person should have to be successful I realized that most the people in our school have a grand total of about 4 of the 7. If we can make that statistic 7 out 7 I believe that we will be the most qualified workers in the business world in the next couple years.

The Web 2.0 World

The Michael Wesch video Web 2.0 … The machine is Us/ing Us explains how we are the web. It is a crazy thought that what I do may affect the web. That I, a 15-year-old boy in Colorado have the power to change something as big as the Internet. The web is an ever changing, ever expanding frontier. Anybody that has access to the Internet can leave a footprint. My sister, an 8 year old already knows how to explore the Internet very effectively. What does this mean for our future? Will younger children be put onto the Internet instead of classrooms? How will education be affected by the new outburst on technology? I believe that technology will start to control the way kids learn. This is good and bad. It is good because technology can help certain student learn better. It creates more quality work and creates skills that can be used in jobs later. It can also be bad. Many people become solely dependent on using the computer for work. Spelling and quality of handwriting will plummet if we only use computers. Also computers are a huge distraction during homework times. Facebook, YouTube, and other sites cause kids to become totally distracted. I believe if used wisely technology can be used for great things.