Gus Allore remembers well the first day with his very own cell phone.
“It was the day after Thanksgiving,” said the Mankato West senior, “in seventh grade.”
Allore now has a Blackberry, from which he surfs the Internet and checks his Facebook account several times day. He also has his own laptop.
Fellow West student Amber Oachs was candid about using her cell phone so much that it’s been taken away from her at school.
“I send, probably, thousands of text messages each month,” the sophomore said.
Allore and Oachs have never used floppy discs or box phones. Neither can really remember the first time they sat at a computer because it was so long ago.
For their generation and those following, technology is not second nature — it’s nature.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 67 percent of today’s students will use a computer in preschool; 80 percent by kindergarten.
But a recent study commissioned by Cisco to catalog the research on technology use in the classroom found that, so far, “the real potential of technology for improving learning remains largely untapped in schools today.”
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Building a digital classroom: Online learning options are growing by Tanner Kent
From MankatoFreePress.com
