After reading Clifford Stoll?s article I have to say I agree with some of the things he said. I believe some of his ideas are a bit off the wall too! Of course I think it is ridiculous that he believes that students up to 12 years old only need to know word processing, spreadsheets, databases and e-mail. I also disagree with the generalization that schools are doing away with music, art, and libraries for computer labs. I have visited many schools in America and around the world and have never seen this before. I do not believe that the libraries of the future will be electronic, and that we won?t have books. I believe that computers are only one of many resources that our students have access to, not the only one. I do agree with Mr. Stoll that children, especially young ones need more interaction with other children or teachers and less time spent on a computer. Children already spend too much time in front of the television and not enough time ?playing?, exploring or learning about their environment hands on. Some schools do tend to spend too much money on computers. For example the school I taught at in Hong Kong. It is a small primary international school with students age 3-10. The school had only been open for 6 months when I first arrived in Hong Kong and it had a lot of money to throw around. Our financial director decided we needed top of the line technology and bought 20 imac?s (we only had 8 classrooms) for the classrooms and about 40 laptops. He installed airports in each room of the school (which never worked) but failed to hire anyone (well anyone that was knowledgeable) to teach us how to use any of this technology! We had so many problems the first few months and we didn?t even end up using the computers until halfway through the year. We pushed and pushed to get training and he kept promising it. Basically we never got it! So we struggled through two years with these computers, having to teach ourselves and I?m sure we didn?t even tap into the potential that these computers offered. The point is, that money never should have been wasted on the technology if the training wasn?t available. Julie McGraw __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree ------------------------------------------------------------ Class website: http://www.greece.k12.ny.us/taylor/suny/ ------------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from this listserv, go to: //www.freelists.org/cgi-bin/list?list_id=edi581 If you have any problems, send an e-mail to: JerryTaylr@xxxxxxx ------------------------------------------------------------