In Our Classrooms: October 2007

More and more frequently, software publishers are delivering their products via the Web instead of CD-ROM. We love this idea for several reasons. For one thing, much of the new software is available both at school and at home. In addition, Web-based software is often compatible with a wider range of computers than CD-ROMs, and it also reduces our installation and maintenance costs considerably. As each of the following software packages becomes appropriate to the curriculum during the year, we will introduce it to students.

All software requires passwords that teachers dispense as appropriate to their students.

• Soliloquy Reading Fluency (demonstration). Students read and hear stories at the same time. Then they can record their own readings, repeatedly if necessary, and improve their fluency and expression. The software was developed after lengthy research and federal funding, and it's both well-designed and effective.
• Google Earth allows students to fly to any location on earth. Links near the location show movies and Web-based information about the location.
• Building Blocks (when you reach this site, click the Building Blocks link for information). Developed by outstanding mathematics educator Doug Clements, who is also principal author of the Investigations math textbooks used at Pike, Building Blocks provides entertaining games that help Lower School students practice number skills.
• Math Circus Act 3, 4, and 5. These logic puzzles for grades 2 and up offer explorations that tease the brain and exercise mathematical thinking skills.
• One More Story. This site reads stories to young children, or allows them to read silently and click to hear words that they aren't sure of.
• Rosetta Stone. We use this well-known software to supplement foreign language instruction for some Upper School students.

In 2004, the Pew American Life project posed the following question to 1,286 Internet experts:

"By 2014, use of the Internet will increase the size of peoples' social networks far beyond what has traditionally been the case. This will enhance trust in society, as people have a wider range of sources from which to discover and verify information about job opportunities, personal services, common interests and products."

There's been a spirited debate about this statement. Thirty-nine per cent of the Pew respondents, for example, believes that social networks will not enhance our lives. On the other hand, in The Virtual World Is Not Enough (TimesOnLine, September 26, 2006), author Jonathan Weber provides 3 interesting examples that virtual worlds inspire people to reach out for new connections in the real one.

Recently, I found myself thinking about this debate quite a lot. Each new wave of technology for the last 50 years has brought with it both dire predictions and heartfelt hopes about its effects on our children. Virtual hangouts, including social networking sites like MySpace, are no different. Certainly children have gotten into trouble using these sites—seeking inappropriate alliances with adults, withdrawing from reality, or participating in unhappy behaviors like bullying encouraged by faceless communication. But just as certainly children have found safe and even nurturing spaces in these worlds. For example, they've found the courage to voice ideas that might be more difficult to do in person, or to discover alliances beyond the limitations of a local community.

I think perhaps that online safety expert Larry Magid takes the best viewpoint: "The challenge for parents, educators, and therapists going forward will be to help young social networkers find the safe, healthy middle ground of online socializing ... and not ... extreme emotions or destructive behavior. The latter, I feel, is the real online-safety issue of the social Web going forward--one that will need all our skill sets, including teenagers' experience with online hangouts." (via email, 9/29/2006)