Technology is an important part of everyday life. We have our cell phones, iPods, and laptops. We constantly check our email and update our facebook status and follow our friends and favorite celebrities on twitter. With technology being so present its time for schools to start incorporating it into all classrooms to help students study and learn. But, it should not be the only way to study and learn. Students still need to interact with their teachers and other students. They also need to still use real books; an electronic kindle cannot replace the feeling of a real book. It’s just not the same thing. They still need to know where the library is and how to use books for studying, and research papers. They need to know who the great authors are and what their writings are like. “With an Internet connection, you can gather the latest stuff from all over, but too many American high school students have never read one Mark Twain novel or Shakespeare play or Wordsworth poem, or a serious history of the U.S.”
The Cushing School in Ashburnham, MA has gotten rid of their entire library to replace it with a digital “learning center.” Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.” It’s great that they want to help students, but they should have combined this “learning center” with the library. Very few students will read a book on their own for fun, and now those few probably will not because they do not a have a library to check books out of. Electronics are not the most reliable things either. They do break and malfunction, and if you spill a liquid on them they usually do not work after that. But a book will never malfunction and if you spill your drink on it it’s going to be ok. Books will also last a lot longer than an electronic. Things become outdated so fast because they are always coming out with a newer, better version. It’s a great idea to have books available on-line, but that should not be the only place that books are available.
Technology should be a tool to help us; it should not be replacing what we have. A lot of my college classes uses technology to help us, but they do not use technology to replace what they are teaching us. My college history professor records his lectures and puts them on iTunes for us to download. This does not mean we can skip the class and just download it. What if we have a question, what if we do not understand something, we would not be able to contact the teacher. It’s a tool to help us study and understand things better. Technology is a great thing, it should just not be used to replace what we have in schools, it should be used to make schools better and to help the students excel.
Hi Ashley:
ReplyDeleteI like the fact that you draw from two of the three sources given you (the third would be helpful, too, no?). We will talk later about how to cite and document sources, but I appreciate your effort to synthesize them within your argument.
The writing is mechanically sound and fluent.
Perhaps I might ask you to consider slowing the pace a bit and using paragraphs in a sharper more focused way--you say soooo much in that first paragraph. Why not slow your argument down, for your reader's sake?
Again, I see much to like in this draft.
This is a good first draft. Everything works well together, I just need to break up my paragraphs more and not put so much in each one, especially in the first paragraph. I used two out of the three sources, and in my second draft I should try and incorporate the third.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure where or how I should break my paragraphs up. I feel that it is a little rushed and jumbled, but I don't want to make it too drawn out and boring for the reader. I would like to know how I should break the paragraphs up for everything to flow really well together, and be smooth transitions from one paragraph to the next.
From this assignment I have learned that I need to slow down in my writing, that I don't have to cram a million things into one paragraph, thagt its ok to spread things out. That will really help me in this class and also in my other classes as well. If I don't cram so much it will be easier to read and understand, and it will also make my point clearer to the reader.
You might try to use the first sentence of each paragraph as your topic sentence, the core idea of that paragraph. When you begin to stray from that topic sentence, that might be a sign of moving to the next paragraph. Makes sense?
ReplyDelete