Beyond Technology: Questioning, Research, and the Information Literate School

By Jamie McKenzie

Beyond Technology: Questioning, Research, and the Information Literate School This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0967407826
• ISBN13: 9780967407821
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: F N O Pr
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Beyond Technology

Great teaching combined with information literacy and questioning skills might transform schools, but there has been entirely too much focus on the promise of wires and cables, laptops and desktops. There has been far too much spending on equipment and too little on professional developent and program development.... It is time we replace the term IT (Information Technology) with IL (Information Lieracy). IT is mainly about flow - the movement of information through networks of various kinds. But adding information in a time of infoglut and data smog (Shenk, 1998) can actually interfere with learning and understanding. Information abundance can overwhelm and drown the learner in irrelevant and unreliable information. IL is mainly about developing understanding and insight. Literacy is about interpretation of information to guide decisions, solve problems and steer through uncertain complex futures. What we need most now is a commitment to IL by schools as they strive to improve reading, writing and thinking of their students. --- excerpt from book's Introduction

The title delivers: it really is beyond technology

I'm a parent of elementary school kids who has become fascinated with their adventures in education. I'm also fairly technically literate and would like to see more educators embracing technology as important tools in their students' quest for insights. I went to see Dr. McKenzie speak at an educator's conference (they let parents in!) and was impressed with the clarity of his vision that kids will only learn how to frame good questions when their teachers have embraced the notion themselves. It's at that point the technology becomes a powerful tool to help kids create good projects. So I went home and bought this book.The book is written for education leaders and teachers, to inspire teachers' professional development in the direction of questioning, research, and information literacy. The book has three sections: - The Primacy of Questioning - The Research Cycle and - Research ModulesMcKenzie lays out the reasons we should care about good questions, gives us some models for the research cycle and how it helps kids learn, and identifies ways to help create modules and use scaffolding to make their work more efficient. Technology is simply a tool to support the teacher and student in information literacy, but a powerful tool that some teachers are reluctant to integrate into their work. (McKenzie's written another great book that specifically discusses that topic: "How Teachers Learn Technology Best")