Technology can be made useful. It has its place, but we all saw how our beautiful Powerpoint presentations had little or no content. This is very dangerous. In January I visited McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where there is a Writing Centre staffed by teachers specifically trained to teach writing. The centre enables students to draft essays or even Powerpoint presentations using computers as tools for writing.
Senior students provide editing assistance in a tutoring program.
At Shore our plans to develop a Learning Centre have been influenced by this model. The Shore History department is currently purchasing a Smartboard, which allows Powerpoint presentations to be given on an interactive whiteboard, and the teacher merely taps the whiteboard to bring up the next point. It also enables notes to be written on the whiteboard over the presentation and have them saved automatically. The temptation to draw Peter Sterling tactical squiggles all over maps of Gettysburg and the Somme will be hard to resist. Several schools have now introduced the Grouputer , which is a type of collaborative computing that facilitates creative teamwork in classrooms.