Good Morning America

I am home today from work to take care of some personal matters and was just watching Good Morning America. They had a entire segment on technology in the classroom and how it is very much widening the digital divide. With the smart boards being used there are hand held tools that allow the students to take quizzes and tests without paper and pencil and the teacher can track performance as they are doing the quiz or test. There are several schools that distribute laptops to every student with their textbooks downloaded onto them. But for the classrooms who are not given laptops, teachers must remember that, though they are high tech in the classroom and utilize alot of these tools, their students may very well go home to little or no technology, so they cannot rely on those means to communicate with the students away from class. In talking to the teachers and the students it was discussed how much more motivated and involved everyone is in the high tech classroom. They also talked about the many high tech tools being used in the schools outside of the classroom. In the lunchrooms, children do not need money anymore but their parents can put money into an account online for their lunches to be paid for out of. Sounds alot like our one card system. But it goes even farther than that in providing to the parents a list online of what types of food their child is purchasing and allows the parents to block certain foods so that their child can not buy them. 1500 schools in 13 states are using Dance, Dance Revolution as part of the physical education program. It made me wonder if any schools are using a Wii for some of the sports activities - bowling, tennis, or baseball for example. They also talked about the interactive robot being tested right now that can even sense the emotions of the child playing with it. These kind of advancements are still very mind boggling to me but I also know that I have become like everyone else in taking for granted the everyday technology in our lives.