Tech savvy kids shun classrooms

According to a report in today’s Australian, tech savvy kids are suffering extreme boredom in the classroom.

According to a report in today’s Australian, tech savvy kids are suffering extreme boredom in the classroom.

Jim Goodnight co founder of business analytics system SAS and founder of the Cary Academy (a school which experiments in new forms of schooling based on smaller class sizes and the use of technology in every day teaching practices) education is stuck in the days of the early settler with blackboards and a teacher at the front of the classroom.

Speaking with Karen Stearne, Goodnight declared: “We either take all the electronics away from the kids so they’ll be interested in school, or you have to put the electronics in the school and I don’t think you’re going to take their iPods and cellphones away.”
“Today’s kids are so used to this interactive world, but when they go to school they have to leave all that behind and watch a teacher at a blackboard.
“School hasn’t changed in 100 years,” he said. “You can’t continue offering the same product; people’s expectations change over time and you have to constantly update and come up with new offerings. The problem is that the consumers, the kids, are not finding it to be a very good product right now.
Goodnight practices what he preaches, putting technology into his classrooms from the get go. Every child at his school has their own tablet computer.
“The kids are all crazy about it,” he said. “Even 12 years ago, when we built the school, it was very clear that this generation was very technically savvy…”

Goodnight believes if we do not maintain children’s interest in the classroom, then in the future we will be left with a workforce ill equipped to deal with the rapid advances expected in technology in the future.
“In a world where technology is advancing as rapidly as it is, we don’t need kids who haven’t even graduated from high school,” he said.

Source: The Australian IT
“We need kids with college degrees. We need to have a workforce that understands the technologies available to us and can truly grasp the potential that data provides, and do things quicker and better.”

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