"TV will rot your brains out!"
"Don't put your children in front of a screen for longer than 20 minutes!"
"The average child spends 2 hours a day looking at a screen."
Ahhhh....remember those days. Makes you nostalgic, doesn't it?
Now districts are squawking that the Tech Gods need more screen time! Give them your daily offering of 6 hours!
Okay, so maybe it's not quite that bad, but we're in a weird limbo: technology is evil/we must use it every second of the day if our children are to learn. Hm. Hopefully there is a balance there.
I cannot describe to you how much I would love to visit Dr. Maria Davou in Athens, Greece and visit her amazing language school. Just from talking to her, you got a real sense that she's got a thick skin (as any owner of a school must) and encourages teachers world wide to use this as your advertisement--show parents "your stuff" as a teacher as it is all under review.
I also admired her sense of wonder about language as she keeps herself a constant beginner, learning a new language every so often. She said it helps her know what helped her to learn a language. I'm remembering now (being a wordy writer, obviously) that summer in Costa Rica when I spent my afternoons trying to write Spanish poetry, or writing daily in my diary now in Spanish, filling in English words where needed. Translingualism is where I lived as a language learner...and I shudder. All those times I gave lectures to my beginner ESL students about not speaking English in class but not have a time other than bathroom breaks where it was okay for them to speak in their L1.
Dr. Davou's insight into advertising her school as having limited tech was eye-opening for me. But the truth is, having less tech is now seen as a school that works harder to meet individual needs. After all, as we have seen recently, just because we have amazing programs like BrainPop or Quizzlet, it doesn't mean it meets the learning needs of everyone *ahem, ESL students!*
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