E09Fall2012

Use classroom helpers or “employees” to help you run the room so you are free to teach.

use proximity and language to sort out what’s happening. Do it with a neutral tone of voice and with a smile on your face whenever possible.

How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training

o how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Teens share considerably more information online than their parents and, as a result, expose themselves to more risk

The encouraging results suggest that American parents and teens are actively managing their online reputations—and with an eye toward good digital citizenship

            A digital citizen is one who knows what is right and wrong, exhibits intelligent technology behavior, and makes good choices when using technology.

I would even include writing, creating, submitting, and sharing work digitally on the computer via email or instant messaging in the category of doing old things (communicating and exchanging) in old ways (passing stuff around).

But new technology still faces a great deal of resistance. Today, even in many schools with computers, Luddite administrators (and even Luddite technology administrators) lock down the machines, refusing to allow students to access email.

Two big factors stand in the way of our making more and faster progress in technology adoption in our schools. One of these is technological, the other social.