A Classroom Library

“I’m bored!” Living in a household with three teenagers I hear this statement frequently. I can’t hear that phrase without being completely bewildered. My children have instant access to thousands of hours of TV programming, hundreds of songs, several dozen video game choices and the entire breadth of the Internet, yet they have a seemingly perpetual need to be entertained. The larger concern I have for my children is how this hunger is being addressed in their educational environments. Today’s educators must find the comparison of their teaching style to the Discovery Channel's network of cable TV channels, offering hundreds of hours of “nonfiction programming,” to be just plain frustrating. The temptation to use new technology to combat the boredom claimed by students may cause teachers to run the risk of being about too much entertainment and not enough education.
In Ron S. Doyle’s online article "Ten Ways To Get Beyond PowerPoint with the Classroom Projector," he explains that one can, “Turn those groans to glee come quiz-time with hyperlinked PowerPoint presentations.” Using definitions and facts from a curriculum to play a “Jeopardy” type game may in fact help students retain important information for an upcoming test or quiz. The challenges for educators would be to not let this technological tool over take the educational process by allowing fun and competition to over shadow the students learning.
One use of the classroom projector mentioned by Doyle, that I found interesting, was using this technology to provide the classroom with access to guest speakers or lectures from the Internet. At face value using the projector in this way doesn’t seem much different than placing a documentary into the DVD player and pressing play. But, if the educator took this idea one step further and added the online tool Skype.com, they could allow the students and speaker the benefit of real-time interaction.
One of the 5 Back to School Must-Haves for Innovative Educators in the online article by Dana Lawit is a Digital Recorder. Lawit suggested this use for recorders,  “Beyond using them with student reporters, I plan on having students record their thoughts prior to writing and recording voice and other audio for Podcasts.” Allowing for student-voice in the educational process should be a fundamental approach in any classroom, which this tool would certainly allow.
For numerous reasons this current generation has been shown to be more narcissistic than pervious ones. In Jean Twenge’s book, Generation Me, she quotes research from Harrison Gough that suggests that GenMe college students are more likely than previous generations to claim, “I have often met people who were supposed to be experts who were no better than I.” Will allowing this generation to create their own edutainment feed their narcissism and reduce their respect for the teacher? When anyone can be instantaneously famous or an expert at anything by merely posting a video on YouTube or uploading a podcast onto iTunes, are these digital recorders or video cameras enhancing education or merely boosting the students ego?
We cannot avoid the need for the classroom to remain relevant to today’s young people or that technology plays a part in that process. These tools, however, should be incorporated into learning fundamentals such as reading and memorization, without overshadowing them for the students perceived need to be entertained.