Hey, Blocking's Not So Bad!

Google Images has become a minefield for technology teachers in elementary schools. We use Internet images for so many different projects, and honestly, most projects just are not as compelling without graphic components. So of course, we have been using the most simple way to find images--Google images. However, I've noticed that in the past few years there are more and more inappropriate pictures popping up on even the most innocuous searches. This week, the inevitable occurred. Some boys figured out that if you search for girls' names and click down a few pages, you're going to find something "cool!" They were doing this at indoor recess at their classroom computers, gaggled together so that teachers on duty could not necessarily see what they were doing. I checked the history and sure enough, they had seen some scantily clad women.

My instinct was NOT to block. My instinct is never to block. I like to try to explain, to discuss. My friend Barry is dating a teacher at another school and she explained her school's philosophy to me this weekend. She said that the kids are actually MORE thoughtful about their image searches when they use Google Web search, then visit the page itself, rather than having Google aggregate for them. I realized she was right. So, I'm going to be blocking Google Images out of our school computers this winter break. But honestly, I think it's going to mean our children do a better job of finding images.

Image credit: www.netbus.org

Contemplating a Name Change

This whole line of questioning that shapes my blogposts, that question of whether kids have a divide between their home use of technology and their school use, might actually suggest that I am a digital immigrant. The fact that I even perceive a divide there might suggest that I see technology as something that can be separated into social/educational use. I say all this because I've read another article (yes, another one), this time from the Annals of the Association of American Geographers from back in 2002. Gil Valentine and Sarah L. Holloway did a bunch of research in the English countryside and summarized it in their article, "Cyberkids? Exploring Children’s Identities and Social Networks in On-line and Off-line Worlds."

Here's an excerpt:
"Our empirical data shows that children’s off-line worlds are incorporated into their on-line worlds in four ways. First, some children’s on-line identities are direct (re)presentations of their off-line identities and activities. Second, even when children construct alternative identities on-line, these are often situated or contingent upon their off-line identities and peer group cultures, in that they are constructed to enhance their off-line identities or to compensate for perceived off-line inadequacies. Third, children’s on-line worlds reproduce off-line class and gender relations. Finally, the limitations of the technology children use and the economic and temporal realities of their everyday lives affect the nature and extent of their on-line activities" (313).

Hmm....maybe there IS NO Ed-Tech Axis. My goodness. What's a girl to do now?

Friend or Frustration?

A friend, Sarah, sent me a New York Times article entitled New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology about how a greater and greater number of teachers (mostly high school and college) are seeing phones, computers and other technology as distractions without educational component. Of course, I can see their point. If I am sitting in a meeting with a computer, I am more likely to become distracted than if I did not have one. It's a draw, a lure away from the events transpiring in front of me.

The only time that does not apply is when the discussion or lesson is so very thrilling that I simply must watch and listen. So, as a teacher, does that mean that every one of my lessons has to be so very thrilling that a student cannot not listen? Must I, as Neil Postman puts it, amuse them to death?--my death, that is, since I would kill myself just trying to make every single lesson amazingly entertaining. And isn't that doing our children a disservice, because when, in the real work world, are they going to be entertained in meetings? It's the most I can do not to walk out when my time is being wasted.