Joe’s Non-Netbook
See Joe. See Joe click the page. See Joe fail. As clever as this almost absurd video is, it reflects the reality that students and teachers are encountering in the classroom. Students are no longer getting the majority of their information from print. Educators must adjust teaching methods to incorporate this reality.
I know this all too well. From the tender age of 5 my students are becoming hard wired to read and respond to computers. Their eyes are being trained to follow the screen. But I don’t think that is all that bad. Students with visual impairments are able to adjust the size and font to make it easier to read and analyze the material. It can talk to each child to support struggling readers. Poor Joe, he can’t look for any additional information on his “non-netbook”. Students using iBooks or Kindles can look up definitions and add valuable knowledge to their reading experience.
It is truly humorous rendition but I wanted my discussion to go one step farther. I embedded this video on my wikipage and showed it to two of our computer classes, one fifth and one eighth grade. Maybe it was the early hour, or just the class but the eighth graders were stunned at the video. It took them a while to figure what was going on, but did see a bit of its humor. The discussion did lead to thinking about the possibility of having on-line texts (no more heavy backpacks) but felt there was a word of concern: what if the Internet goes out (which is what happened this morning)? It was a reality in our rural community….
The fifth graders were surprisingly more vocal about this video clip. I had a short discussion and then sent them to our class blog. This is our second attempt at blogging so I am working very hard on expanding their responses so many comments were short but clear. I was surprised this young age (10-11) many understood that he didn’t know what to do. Another response commented, "it would be a lot easier to use online books we could get updates". But truly my favorite from one wise observer: "Joe's problem is that he doesn't know how to make the book do what he wants the book to do. He's been on the computer to much."
Bibliography:
 |
| Topic discussion to guide class blog. |
Student comments retrieved from Anne Asplund’s class blog. www.blogmeister.com. September 17, 2010.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAnne, I thought the video was silly and humorous but at the same time I have to admit it did annoy me a little bit. My students do have a username and password to an online textbook and they still don’t use it. In fact, if I only sent home the username and password I know for a fact I would get complaints. Granted the complaints would probably come from parents, however year after year students have admitted to me that they don’t use the online textbook and forget their usernames and passwords. To make it even easier, we make sure they have the same username and password all the way through middle school. Maybe online textbooks would be great for the technology savvy motivated students but not all. They still hold importance in my classroom.
ReplyDelete