Technology vs. Non-Technology

I taught my technology/nontechnology based lesson plans today with some very interesting results. I had the 5th grade students I was working with research information about specific explorers. Half the class was doing their research by book in the library, and the other half was doing their research via the internet. Every student was given the same worksheet to guide their research. As expected, the computer group was able to fill in the worksheet entirely, and only about ¼ of the nontechnology group was able to fill in the whole sheet. Some of the nontechnology group was only able to answer one or two of the questions, leaving the other 15 blank. If the library had limited or no material for their explorer, they had to rely solely on the information in their text book, which may not have answered everything they were required to find. Also, each student in the computer group filled in their worksheet with time to spare.



Although these results were not extremely surprising to me, the gap was. To see how quickly and how much more information the technology group was able find compared to nontechnology group was almost scary. How limited our knowledge must have been before the age of the internet! I also found it to be very interesting to hear the responses about their thoughts from the students. While doing their research, the nontechnology group didn’t even know how to find books or conduct their research. They had never been exposed to research that way, it had all been via technology in the past. They also had very similar responses to those we heard from Joe in his non netbook experience. They felt that their research was limited because of the scarcity of their resources. I had always felt that this was the new norm for conducting research, but to hear it from these 10 year old minds really did astound me!