My problem with all this, is that while all this stuff is fun for the teachers, as they do not have to actually teach, and they feel they are all high-techie and everything… and some students will have fun, too, YET, we are leaving the majority of students behind…

Although, looking at where the world is going in a geopolitical sense, I agree that the “dumbing down of our schools”, and our population, is an essential thing for the future. In the year 2025, I think we will need a lot more good old fashioned cannon fodder and labourers, and far far fewer eggheads. The end of cheap energy, the onset of unstoppable climate change (Largely due to cycles in the Earth and the Sun), the end to the easy and cheap access of resources, and the vast population demographic changes that are about to hit us will ensure that…. Too many people on too small a planet…. I am reminded of the fruit fly experiments of the 1970′s, and how the researchers were all dismayed, when the canned colonies died, when the bugs destroyed their environments.

Now, I come from the world of business. And I ask, how many businesses, actually, for example, use Prezi a lot?
Most use Powerpoint, because they can import art they touched up from MS Paint, and charts, graphs, table and spreadsheets direct from Excel. They can also import documents, tables, text and so forth straight from Word. Then they can import other things from Publisher. Moreover, all of it is view-able, sometimes editable, and generally always printable. Everything is from the same suite of programs. What are the kids to do when they graduate… and hit the real world? Rather than have them be semi-capable in a dozen software programs, all which essentially do the same thing, it might be better to have them be fairly expert at one or two. The same could be said for One Note, although it may be more prevalent. The problem here is that there are a dozen versions of each program out there….. And the newer versions are not necessarily better than the old ones.

The issue, is that the kids are spending more time learning how to use gadgets that will be obsolete in 2-3 years, and little time in actually learning facts, processes, methods, and procedures that they may need to be able to use later on in life. Of course, we would have to be able to determine what they will actually use later on in life. That is, what they will actually earn a living from, and participate in society from…. The stuff everyone uses and needs, from balancing a checkbook, to doing a quick home budget, from doing ones own income tax return, to knowing how to paint a wall, and how should one completely finish a regimen of antibiotics a doctor prescribes. (Just to name a few I have sen people graduate from school totally ignorant of.)

Unless you are going to be a scientist or a biologist, knowing how to dissect a frog, is kinda useless. Knowing how to decant, is useful, I have done it many times, but in 56 years, outside of high-school, I never have had to titrate a single thing. History was fun, but completely useless and un-necessary. I never earned a dime from any of it. (For my fellow students it was worse, they were bored to tears.) What little music they tried to teach me, drove any enjoyment of it away from me for years. I had no talent, no aptitude, no interest, and was tortured for 2 years by sadistical little penguin nuns. Most of my fellow students felt the same. We had 2 or 3 kids in class who had any interest in it, and they could actually play an instrument, and knew more than the teachers did. We would have been better of being taught something else, anything else. Art? That was a waste. We were told to draw a friggin old boot that sat on a stool on a table. I had expected to learn about famous artists and sculptors. That never happened. My loss. The $50 art kit we were required to buy, was never used. (Bummer!) I got much more out of a grade 12 RESPLAN class, where I learned how to draw basic floor plans. That at least got me a job for 2 years some 30 years later. Clearly, the challenge then, is finding just WHAT one should teach kids.

Hopefully readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic will be part of it, because kids today cannot write or compose to save their lives. THey also cannot make change for a $20. They can do crude videos on their cell phones. Is this what the world of tomorrow’s work will entail?
Text speak and tweetspeak? “U no Ur no 2 bit dude >8&” Clearly, this is not Shakespeare.

Definitely, slow scaffolding, the building up on existing knowledge of facts and procedures, and going slow with gadgets and software is the way to go. And most of these things are complicated to use. Perhaps (probably) the teachers were not well trained in advance…. One must learn how to crawl, then walk, then run. You cannot expect anyone, child or adult, to be immediately familiar with some gadget, just because it is the latest thing. Too much time an emphasis gets spent on the gadgets, and not on learning, or on the more important aspects: retaining, and understanding. Clearly, the school boards and teachers were way out of their league and depth, and the salesmen saw them coming…

One would think that people who were supposedly trained in teaching, and knew how, and had experience, would have started slow, and taken care to ensure that the students could actually use these toys. “Too soon, too much, too fast…” I have seen that sort of thing happen before. And both in education and outside of education. Sometimes one must plan a little before one acts.