In all honesty though, I don't know if I can take a side when it comes to this issue. Media and technology, whether we like it or not, are becoming more and more intimate parts of our lives. The age of children that have cell phones is getting younger all the time and kids have complete access to social networking sites. Us older ones never go anywhere without our phones and sit at our computers for at least an hour a day, at least! So even if I personally wish it would just settle down, it won't, and therefore I have to realize that in order for teachers, or anyone else for that matter, to reach their students and engage them they're going to have to use the media a lot more than before.
I think the media and technology can take away children's innocence, make them grow up way too fast, but when they eventually do grow up their going to have to be well acquainted with the various ways of communicating and researching that the, say internet, provides. Technology can help us get a lot more done, and at a faster pace, but it can also distract us and actually numb us to thinking creatively and doing things differently. There are good things and bad things about it, as there are with most things in this world, but I feel educators need to not rely so heavily on it and make sure that their students have mastered the abilities that are becoming exstinct instead. For the most part everyone is going to have some degree of knowledge about how to use technology and the media, but what they're probably not going to know how to do is write a poem, brainstorm their ideas, read the body language and social cues of others, etc. That is what is scary about integrating the media and technology into education as heavily as we are seeming to do.
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