chapter 4

To be honest, I don’t believe that this chapter influenced my ideas about technology or how I will use it my classroom. The only thing I really took from the reading was that as society advances and culture changes there tends to also be changes in education. At the very end of the chapter, the author discussed how the demands on schools have changed and I guess he is using this as an argument for supporting technology, although I don’t think he explained it very well. For example, he stated, “The aging population and the declining birthrate have meant that a smaller proportion of the adult population has children in school. This makes it increasingly difficult to tax the general population to pay for schools.” What is he suggesting here? Is he proposing that everyone learn from their home computer rather than going to school? One quote that I did really like was: “There is more and more demand for people to be thinkers and lifelong learners, since technology is rapidly replacing people in the routine jobs of the society. Functioning effectively in society requires people to be able to use a variety of technologies to accomplish sophisticated tasks. This means that there is enormous pressure on education to move away from the traditional goals of memorizing facts and learning to carry out routines.” This is so true. We shouldn't be memorizing facts, we should be learning how to predict, experiment, and problem-solve to gain critical thinking skills. We can use these higher level skills to program and use technology to do lower-level thinking skills for us.