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Showing posts from May, 2013

Walking the Technology Balance Beam!

*Image thanks to Robert Lawton (Robert Lawton) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons I have so many conversations with teachers and parents about their fear that students will spend so much time in front of a screen that they will lose the ability to relate to people face to face. As a parent of two kids, I understand this fear. We have rules in our house to limit screen time and talk often about the importance of balancing screen time with being active and spending time with family. However, I am finding that many teachers and parents want to view schools as the last bastion of offline activity. They believe we need to teach kids how to act offline and they will learn how to act online somewhere else. Here is my problem with that premise: It doesn't work! First, most of the online activity of kids outside of school is unsupervised. So who exactly is teaching them what to do? Kids need guides in the online world. They need