How will you use technology to learn?

As a middle school science teacher it upsets me to see what Kasi and Al have written here. Showing students videos that they cannot engage in discourse with will not help them learn. And to Al, the education style of the older generation never worked in the first place. I am sure it looked like it worked when all you needed was a HS diploma to get a good job an support your families. But in America today you need at least a BA or BS if you want to be in the situation to take care of your family sufficiently. People need to talk to learn. They also need to be internally motivated to learn. Unfortunately the watered down classroom environment that passes for education in many schools today bores kids and does not teach them a love of learning. There is no silver bullet to solve this problem, we need many different types of schools because we have many different types of learners. For those of you interested in a "new" teaching method that seems to resonate well with the students involved then do an internet search for "democratic schools" or "free schools." These are schools which truly put the student first. Unfortunately, the name "free school" is misleading in that all but one school found in Canada are private schools and that puts them out of reach of some of our nations neediest children. For a good introduction to these schools go to www.youtube.com and search for "New American Schoolhouse" you will get to watch a documentary created by students at one of these schools. It is profound. The first thing we need to do to help people learn is to ask the learner what they need. Let us not assume we know better than the student.