How Taking Education Into the Technology Era?

Had our first "meet the teacher" night yesterday evening. Wow what an eye opener that was! Three parents walked out, one threatened to remove their child from the school and two were just downright rude to the teacher.

Why you may ask?

All because he has dared to step away from the "norm", he is letting children choose their topics and the "tools" they want to use to complete those topics. His thought process is that if children enjoy what they are doing they will learn more... I like it!

When I was at school we were "talked at"; questioning or disagreeing with your teacher was considered bad manners and instead of being encouraged you were more likely to be plonked outside the classroom!

This teacher has been teaching for over 15 years and over the last 5 has been encouraging children more and more to use technology rather than pen and paper. Some of the parents last night thought this was outrageous, but why? Our children whether we like it or not will more likely type their essays, projects and email each other than sit with a nice notelet and take pen to paper!

Whilst I agree they must be able to write, their lifestyle will be very different to how mine was at that age. Surely we want their education to move with the times.

I actually picked up pen and paper the other day to write a letter to my daughter's teacher about a doctor's appointment and it made me realise that I hadn't actually "written" anything in about two weeks!

So are we putting too much emphasis on the "written" word when actually it is more important that they are able to communicate effectively no matter what tool they use?

This teacher is also using a website "game" to teach them mental arithmetic, and you know what? My daughter is coming home and playing this in her own time and then her friends come round and they play it some more, even competing against each other. So when I ask Jennifer a Maths sum she is now amazingly fast at calculating it in her head! So surely this must be a good thing?

My daughter's class have even started their own blog, which I think is fabulous. What a great way to encourage creative writing; this of course will help spelling and punctuation even though it is not done with a pen!

I suppose my point is, are we, the Parents, holding our children back because we are scared of the change? Of course there is a place for the three R's but don't we have to take those three R's and move them into the 21st Century? It could be we just can't keep up; the computer age can be daunting for anyone who is not in that line of work but isn't it fantastic that your children can actually teach you a thing or two?