RE: Technology

"if a student spends 10 hours learning how to download weather date..., he no longer has 10 hours to learn about weather itself"

Excellent point. This is where the "vendors" have totally failed schools. I have built "technology integrated" lesson plans so that students can "download weather date" as stated and then USE that data in the class. I also saw that most lesson plans designed to do that (available through lesson plan sharing) do in fact spend 10 hours learning how to download through an arcane interface weather data. This is made worse because the next semester the download technique no longer works and has been "changed". That's why "my" lesson resources integrating this aspect of technology have an assignment or lesson page that make the portion dealing with downloading weather data "hot" and a single click gets the data and another "technique" (often pressing ctrl-C to copy) has the students back into the actual weather lesson learning about weather.

We must REFUSE TO BUY course-ware or online lessons that hijack our students time and divert them into "fun" multimedia forays into academic never-never-land.

It IS POSSIBLE to have technology integrated lessons that are actually much better and far more time-efficient for both students and teachers and which don't interfere with the learning objectives. (Learning objectives which, by the way, ought to be easy to know about once a decent Master Plan is implemented.)

Phil