Chapter 2 of Rethinking Education

This chapter focused on the enthusiast argument on the role that technology should play in today's classrooms. Enthusiasts believe that teachers should be using the technology of the 21st century to teach our students than to continue to use 19th century techniques. They believe that any type of technology that can be used instead of a textbook or lecture should be. Everything in our world is changing with technology, including the way we think about things. When students are assigned a research paper, pretty much all of them will use the internet as thier first resources. This is just one example of how our lives are dramatically going toward more technological based tools. I have no doubt that this society is changing, but I still don't agree completly with the enthusiast view discussed in this chapter. Yes I think it is important for students to be able to enhance their learning through some computer use, but I don't think that this is the only thing that they should be doing. The part of this chapter that discussed video games really didn't sit well with me. They say that a student playing Madden is teaching more math than a teacher teaching their students math. They say that self-guided exploration is currently out of reach of our current schooling system. I would disagree with this because I think their is a time and place for self-guided discovery. I don't think a child's whole schooling should be them sitting on a computer, with the computer telling them what to do. I think this takes away a lot of important communication and other skills that should be taking place in the classroom. As a future teacher, I plan on including lessons that have my students explore and discover new things on their own, but not soley on the computer. There are far more other ways to teach than just with technology. I will always make sure that my students get their technology fix and understanding in, but I still believe in a lot of traditional schooling. There are still some teachers that refuse to use technolgy in their classroom, and this I can see a problem with. However, for completely basing school off of the computer I don't see myself doing in the future.