Whatever you want to call it, the computer age, the information generation, or the digital revolution, it his here and it is here to stay. We may be able to move past it but never reverse it. So it is now up to us to deal with it. One aspect of this technology era is the impact of computers and the internet on our children and their education. How will our children be able to keep up with the ever changing technologies and inventions that are saturating our society?.
Many schools have answered this dilemma by applying the use of computers and the internet in classrooms across the country. Government agencies and major corporations have teamed up in order to supply the increasing demand of such tools. Now whether it is to create a smarter citizen or a hungrier consumer is beside the point. How they got there or why they got there is not as important as what to do with them. So I think that we all need to understand that using computers as a tool to help students learn is a necessary and natural evolution of the educational process.
There are those new age Luddites and some educators that say we already have the necessary tools our children need to learn. Computers are not needed to accomplish this task when they have up-to-date textbooks and educated teachers to help them develop. I could see their point since I certainly did not need a computer to help me do math growing up. Neither did my parents or grandparents. So why should my children need computers?.
My grandparents learned how to do basic math by using their fingers, a pencil, a paper and a teacher. They probably only learned just enough to know how may chicken, pigs, and cows they had on the ranch. My parents, who moved to the city, learned more complex forms of math like word problems and algebra with the help of a textbook and times table. They used math to help them do their taxes', pay the bills, and for all other day to day applications.