Great Quote

Firstly, do people post more than one blog entry a day?

Secondly, I've been checking out various edublogs, and while reading The 21st Century School House, I found this quote:

I am lucky enough to have a new classroom set of laptops for next year. If I do nothing more than plop my students in front of those laptops and ask them to write their papers in Word or whip up a PowerPoint, then I am not doing my job. In fact, with this 1:1 computer opportunity, I have a much greater responsibility to bring those flat world possibilities into F14. What would be worse than if the students left my class thinking that school computers are only good for nothing more than old fashioned writing tasks and finding ways to bypass filters to access their Myspace accounts?

This is EXACTLY what I've been trying to get across in my writing group. We can no longer think of ourselves as teaching the students how to use technology by saying, "Make a PowerPoint for your presentation." While PowerPoint is a great thing - I use it all the time - teachers aren't utilizing it properly for student learning. They're saying, "Make a PowerPoint" without taking the time to teach someone how to successfully integrate PowerPoints into an oral presentation. It becomes a crutch for the student instead of an aid.

Maybe that's the problem - if we teach kids how to use PP, then it will be a more useful too.

I digress. I just feel, like Mr. Miller of the 21st Century School House, that if the kids aren't at least exposed to ways to share written information, then what's the point of giving them these tools?