Assignment 2-what have I learned?

I really enjoyed the article about digital immigrant vs. digital natives. I am happy to report that I am a digital immigrant. I am not that old, I graduated high school in 1992. In my computer class, we entered code on a monitor that only showed in green font. After countless hours of code writing, I would hit execute, and magically, a happy face would appear on the dark monitor and wink at me. Thankfully we have come a very long way since then.
Students in my class today have always known and used the internet, i-pod, and countless other electronic devices. I on the other hand remember records, tapes, and walkmans. Again, thankfully we have come so far. One can only imagine what other kinds of technological advances we can make. To think that a floppy disk has now been replaced by a flash drive that can fit on my key chain and hold 100 times more data is just amazing.
As for the articles...the Pensky article was fascinating to me. I really enjoyed the part talking about students "thriving on instant gratification and frequent rewards." I find this especially true with 6th grade boys. They are plugged in so much at home, playing games with total points and "life" points, that when they are at school they often times struggle with traditional lessons. My job is to mix it up and offer "real world" lessons that can keep the interest level up.
My school district is a perfect example of the struggle between how to distribute new information. Today we had Word 2007 training. It lasted 3 hours. Before we started we were told that we had the option of whether to install the new version or wait until next school year. Really!!!! I know that half of the staff will not be installing anything until they have to. To top it all off...we were basically forced to stay with the snail’s pace of training. Not to mention that a 50 page tutorial was provided to us. In this economic crisis that we are facing, could this info. have not been sent to us via email? Plus, we could then work on our own computers at our own pace. Whatever, I know I am venting, it is just so frustrating.
Earlier in the week we had web page creation training. This time, color copies were provided to each staff member, and again we had to pace ourselves at a crawl. We were not allowed to make many decisions about design layout, etc. So in the end the entire staff will soon have web pages, which basically all look exactly the same. We waste so much time and effort with tasks that could be delivered to us in a much more sensible manner.
Okay off my soap box and back to the rest of the assignment...the two you tube videos were awesome, very eye opening and in a way very motivating. They both scream to me that it is time to re-think how we are teaching our children. I wish we had more computers and fewer non-teaching or down times, like specials. I never feel like I have enough time to teach the tasks that I want and need to teach. This is my first year in sixth grade, previously I taught 4th grade. Sixth graders have such higher technology skills, I was shocked at how much easier it is for them to navigate the internet. Last week, we went to the computer lab, I gave then 20 minutes to locate 2 Super Bowl tickets, airline tickets, and lodging for three nights. The goal was to get all these items for as cheap as possible. To my delight, a few managed to get all three for less than I did. And all 20 students were able to complete the task in the 20 minute time frame. I will not under-estimate my students' internet abilities again.
The Warlick article just frustrated me, b/c we cannot have our students blog. I so wish we could b/c I agree that the quality of writing and responses would improve tremendously. Maybe sometime soon we can actually use the available technology in the most productive manner.