Tools of the mind

Tools of the mind was my least favorite of the three articles. The first thing that bothered me about this article is it uses data from 1999-2003; that was a very long time ago and it is really hard for me to believe that those facts are still true. The author states, “the most commonly used applications are what I call show-and-tell applications- PowerPoint, Word, Publisher, and Front Page-with the Internet the most commonly used non-show-and-tell kind of application in terms of frequency of classroom use. Classrooms rarely use spreadsheets or databases, which are conceptually and technically more difficult.” I believe more recent data would show that databases are a big part of middle and high school, I know from personal experience they are used to find research, scholarly journal articles, etc to write research papers and complete projects. The other thing I don’t agree with is that technology should be almost invisible. Yes technology should support the core areas of teaching but why does it have to be invisible? Technology is not invisible to today’s student it is very much a part of who they are as learner.