745. Students learning to contemplate




One day teacher of English B said to teacher of English A, “I’m trying to update my capability of utilizing the new technologies as tools to improve my students’ learning English.



Sometimes I take my kids to the computer hall, and have them search topics like history of aviation-challenges or Asian countries. I assign a limited time to fulfill this work, like fifteen minutes for instance. We use Google (Explorer 8) and Firefox. They are just great to quickly find information. The students work in pairs or in groups of three, because of the number of available computers.



One father came up to me last week and made me think: he told me that obviously it kept being necessary to read books – also e-books, sure – for they make the kids think more carefully, contemplate, be creative, invent stories, ponder things: in a word, to be more careful and calm in thinking. The Internet, yes, but also books.



He added this was not any ‘against’ the Internet at all: both are complementary, evidently, and when using the Internet it also helps think.



Kids need to learn how to think in a calm and creative way, read carefully, enjoy reading, relate parts of the plot and the characters among them. In that way kids would improve (as well) their spelling and get a neat handwriting. As a conclusion, if I wish my students to be more really-thinking people, and so, more independent and critical about current thinking, I ought to learn how to combine the Web with reading books – and e-books.” / Photo from: informedfarmers com. New Zealand farms

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