Education and Technology

Update: I have turned off comments on this post because of a high rate of spam comments. I am using the WP Ban plugin and this post is one of the greatest for attracting spam.

I’m running a poll on the usage of ActivBoards versus SMART Boards in the the school systems around the world. Vote below and please feel free to comment and discuss this in the comment section below.

Personally I’ve used both in our district, but we have went strictly ActivBoards in the whole district this past year. They have been a big hit, I would hope so when they cost $14 million, with the staff and the students. I look forward to seeing us increase our grades on the FCAT this year.

Technorati tags: Educational Technology, Education, Promethean, ActivBoard, SMART Boards

With all the emphasis on Reading and Writing in the FCAT and other standardized tests, History, Social Studies and Civics have all taken a back seat.

I appreciate and respect the teachers at our school, but I found it odd with all the new technology, including ActivBoards, Discovery Streaming and just plain old Google that not one teacher that I asked was doing a presentation about the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. It isn’t hard to find something. Are we so pressed to teach reading (90 minute required blocks), writing blocks and now science with it being part of the FCAT?

So, where do we really fit in the history of our country? Do we forget about 9/11, Vietnam, Korea, World War II, World War I, the shuttle disasters, the Boston tea party, the Cuban missile crisis and I can go on and on. Do we just teach selected history or do we do a creative rewrite of history to condense the intimate parts or dates into just main era’s like the Wars of the 20th century? I find it hard to believe that a date that brought us into one of the major wars of recorded history is being forgotten because it’s been 66 years since it happened and the people that were there are either in their 80’s or have passed away. Is it that we are so intent on reading and writing or is it being one of the worst countries in the world in education that we’ve decided that we have to push reading and writing in spite of our history?

I believe we could have taken a piece of our planning time to prepare a lesson on Pearl Harbor. Of course these lessons could have taken just as little as a brief half an hour of class time.Here are just some of the places that I found using technology and just good old Google.

• Wikipedia: Attack on Pearl harbor
• National Park Service: USS Arizona Memorial
• National Geographic: Remember Pearl Harbor
• Naval Historical Center: Pearl Harbor Raid

Some others that I can’t post links because they are on sites that are for use by educators with access, such as Promethean Planet and Discovery Streaming. I found more than one video on Discovery Streaming and one FlipChart on Promethean Planet. Here are the image grabs from my searches:

Have we forgotten? Are we forgetting all the people that fought and died for our country? I hope not, because we need to know our history to know our failures, our weaknesses and our strengths.

“A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it.” – Winston Churchill

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” – George Santayana

Technorati tags: Pearl Harbor, History, Educational Technology, Education