This week, Huntsville City Schools made a major investment in our children's future.

The school system purchased several netbooks, and ipads for the schools geared to

help position our children to complete in the workforce.

Is this the answer to helping our children be ready to compete?

At one school in the heart of Silicon Valley, the answer is no.  With students who's parents

work for such technology giants as Apple, Ebay, Google, Yahoo, and Hewlett Packard.  This school says

no..  The thought at this school is that computers "inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction,

and attentions spans"

While some thought is that students will not tune in without these elements, certain evidence suggest

otherwise.  Because of wonderful applications like google, technology  is as easy to use as possible

making it easy to learn at a later age.

Other studies back up the curriulum at the Waldorf School. In 2001, the Alliance for Childhood,

a nonprofit organization in College Park, Maryland, released “Fool’s Gold: A Critical Look at Computers in Childhood,”

a report supported by more than eighty-five experts in neurology, psychiatry, and education, including Diane Ravitch,

former U.S. assistant secretary of education; Marilyn Benoit, president-elect of the American Academy of Child and

Adolescent Psychiatry; and primate researcher Jane Goodall. “Fool’s Gold” charged that thirty years of research on

educational technology had produced just one clear link between computers and children’s learning.  This was that on

standardize test, drill and practice programs appear to improve scores modestly though not as much or as cheaply

as one on one tudoring"  Also "A 1995 analysis by the college board showed that students who studied the arts for more

than 4 years scored 44 points higher on the math, and 59 points higher on the verbal sections of the SAT.  Nonetheless,

over the past decade, one-third of the nation's public music programs were dropped.  During the same period,

annual spending on School Technology tripled to 6.2 billion.  Between early 1999, and September 2001, education

technology attracted nearly 1 billion in venture capital, according to Merrill Lynch and Company"

While the problem isn't with the computers themselves as they are just the tools, the problem becomes overdependance

on them removing or replacing other sources of learning from the arts to nature.

Technology is a tool.

In Schools where technology is the forefront, scores on standardize test have become stagnant.  There is little proof that

technology is the answer to improving these test scores.  A district in Arizona that has spent over 33 million on technology

updates has seen this first hand.  If our eduators are teaching software applications, then are math, reading and writing

fundamentals being compromised?

Richard Louv Last Child in the Woods, Kindle Edition

New York Times-A Sillicon Valley School that doesn't compute

New York Times-In Classroom of Future-Stagnant Scores