Is Technology The Best We Have To Offer Our Kids?

I keep getting notices about "cookies." The kind that mean, "We are watching you, do you mind? How much do you want us to watch you? Only 'necessary' cookies or all the cookies we have?" You know what? The only kind of cookies I want are the kind you eat. For years, I paid attention to their warnings, saying, "If you choose not to accept cookies, your online experience will not be as good." Of course, that's a paraphrase, but I'm sure you have seen it. I am so fed up with Big Tech right now. I have worked as a literacy tutor for ten years. I have been certified to teach two languages in secondary schools, I have advanced degrees in family relations and child development, I have worked in journalism, and I am fairly proficient in Spanish, having learned to speak it as a teenager. I am still trying to figure out what benefits children are receiving from all the technology implanted in our schools these days. I was happy to hear that New York is now going to ban electronic devices in school, until they said the ban did not include the ones the school provided. Well, I'm glad they're doing something, but I think they should start all over with all this "smart" technology they're putting in the schools. Too many children are still not learning to read, still not learning to write, still not learning how to think and speak, not as well as they could if some of these bells and whistles were not so prevalent in our classrooms. And, well, the good news is I get to help them, but the bad news is why are they spending so much time on their iPads? No wonder they are having trouble reading. Of course, this is my opinion, and this is just a blog. I do plan on exploring this more in the future, and I'm off to see a live debate between our two mayoral candidates, and I don't want to be late. I just realized that this is what is on my heart more and more these days, because I see kids struggling, and yet these devices give more spoon-feeding and eye-hand coordination practice (clicking prompts) than literacy and learning. I'm sorry. I promise to provide more background information and research when I write about this more in the future, but for now I just want to put a little bug in your ear. If you care about this, I hope you'll let someone know, like a schoolboard member, for example. At this point, for me, practically every educator I talk to about this agrees that much of the technology fails to develop students' academic skills, and yet nobody really knows what they can do about it. I'm not sure I do, this is just my opinion, but I know the young people in our country need more attention in this area, if we are going to survive as a representative democratic Republic.