My daughter needed to produce a collage based on a film and poem for English. After some searching on the internet for a suitable poem to evaluate I suggested we visit our local library and pick up some books on Australian poetry. We joined up and found three suitable books immediately. They had indexes of course so it was a quick task to find something to use. OH… I was very happy to find Rob Lowe's
autobiography on the shelf so I borrowed that too. Just saved $15 as I was going to buy that for my kindle!
Google was turned to for the pictures to put in the collage. While trying to do this at school a lot of sites were blocked so she was having difficulty finding the right sot of pictures. Unfortunately we are without a colour printer so she decided to email the photos to her father at his office in the city where hopefully he could print them and bring them home. Technical difficulties arose where the pdf document containing the photos was too large to email despite the fact that the photos themselves were small. Eventually she resolved it and although her trusty father delayed his trip home to get the printing done the results weren't quite what was expected. All the photos printed were massive - A4 each and too large to put on the A3 size sheet to be handed in!
At 8pm the night before the project was due this was not needed! Sadly we began to panic and considered knocking on the neighbour's door to ask for the use of their printer. However at some point someone with some common sense (I'm not sure if it was me or my husband) suggested we look in some magazines for the photos. Calmly we sat down with a couple of magazines and last weekend's newspaper and she found everything she needed - even two images of an unborn baby!
It was a sobering experience and I was shocked at myself for being so reliant on google for homework yet again.
Susan Maushart documented her experience of disconnecting from all things digital with her three teenagers in The Winter of our Disconnect. She mentions that often the most hostile reactions of this experiment came from adults concerned her about her children's ability to study or do homework without access to the web. Let's not let our children lose all threads of creativity by constantly being connected. Teach them how to do some things without google just in case. What if there was a power failure or modem breakdown on the night before something was due… how would they cope?
