Response to "Why can't kids find Baghdad on the map"

The issue of accessibility to technology and information has been a
recurrent theme in a lot of our classes in the past couple of years.
It has often become a debate on whether teaching and education should stay
relatively the same, change completely and use all the resources that are
at our fingertips, or to combine the two and make the best of both worlds.
In my opinion, I think that for the time being, it is still important for
us to approach education as a combination of the two teaching strategies.
For some subjects, the textbook is still a useful resource - history is
history, and math problems are math problems. However, with this in mind,
we are now exposed to so many different ways to educate and engage our
students in the subjects that we are teaching.

I was glad that the article touched on the shift that has occurred for
who/what the students depend on for knowledge. I believe that over the
next decade or so, our role will change from being a "teacher" to a being
a "facilitator".  Yes, students have developed the skills of "searching,
accessing, organizing/representing, and communicating" information (just
as we did), but what are they truly looking at? Students now just have a
far greater pool of information to sift through and find the relevant
information that they are looking for - if they don't know what to search,
or how to pick through the information, they will be lost in "cyber
space". Although our role may change, students still need guidance and
education on what information is accurate, relevant, etc - a lot of the
students that i taught on my practicum believed that Wikipedia was the
Holy Grail for information acquisition. With this being said, our role may
be changing, but we are still guiding our students on how to "search,
access, organize/represent, and communicate" information, just in a
different way than we did when we were in high school.

Unfortunately, the upcoming generation (and even my generation) has an
attention span of a gnat. I believe that this is directly tied to our
accessibility to information, as we can find any answer we want to almost
any question that is posed in seconds...and then off to the next task. I
think that the part that will stay the same in the classroom is the
necessity to teach students that life outside of the classroom and typical
teenage home-life is not just surfing the web, videogames and TV. Once
they have left the school, there is (usually) a job out there waiting for
them and it does not allow for this gnat-like attention span. Although I
think it is important to use the technology available to us, it is just a
tool to use the classroom...it doesn't change the other half of teaching
that goes beyond the information/curriculum and helps prepare our students
for the "real world".