Engage 'em or Enrage 'em

Don't tell me for a second that technology - well used properly and constructively - can't challenge, engage, and inspire, and even - gasp - entertain them.

Is that so bad?  I kind of think that's a teacher's job in the 21st century.

I have my doubters, true.  And that's actually a good thing.  It keeps me justifying what I do with technology.

Yes, Twitter, Blogger, and Youtube can (and mostly are) used for gossip and socializing.  But they have excellent potential for academic purposes.

We have to show the kids that potential.  We do it with books all the time.  Yet, as soon as they leave school or pull out their SSR books, do we expect them to be reading Moby Dick. Pride and Prejudice, or Shakespeare.  Yet, do we get frustrated with them for reading YA fodder?

Of course not.  The skills they are using while reading are vital.  And that YA fodder might eventually lead them one day to the good stuff of the canon.

And we could well turn this back on us as professionals.  How many of us ever bother to pick up the 'classics'?  How many of us stay current with the up-to-date research in our field?  How many of us actually write anything or try to get published?

Yet, we don't give the benefit of the doubt to technology.  Either it's a new form of entertainment for the kids or it's just glorified gossiping.

Here are shots from my Lit and Lang 9R class of kids totally engaged and - gasp - reading and blogging.

Believe it or not.

I didn't ask them to pose.  I just took a pause from what I was working on and saw them engaged and working.  And I had to capture it.  For evidence.  Technology isn't the devil.