> I happen to see a synergy between teachers and old Life magazines, Me too. > Maybe we are reading the old Life articles to get a sense of life in the > Fifties, maybe we are cutting out pictures and building collages, maybe we > are taking silly putty and transferring images of faces onto to the putty > and stretching the images and smiling. >
I have no objection to any of these activities. However, when it comes to perusing collections of old media, such as magazines, sometimes (not always) the digital realm is the place to look. Here's how I see it: cyberspace is shaping up to be one of the greatest libraries the world has ever known. Schools are front ends to great libraries. Schools should be a front end to cyberspace. I can get access to Life covers, plus a lot of the famous pictures, online, e.g. here: http://www.life.com/Life/ All the sites I checked encouraged me to buy prints for like $20 a pop. Thanks to the Internet, kids will at least be able to look at pix. Here's one of Gandhi: http://frames.barewalls.com/frames/life/52/52105,52302/10/closeup/j8pod00245 352c.jpg Found this with Google images: http://www.chromosome.com/lifeDNA/Life-cover-April99.jpg (and many more covers as well, plus some inside pix). Great if you have a collection of old Life magazines in the school. My daughter has all the National Geographic magazines, including ads, back from a certain year (cost about $50 at Fry's Electronics) -- on CD (so again, one needs the computer). Also: because cyberspace *is* a great library, the option to homeschool, if you have a home computer and decent internet connection, is more attractive than ever. Not just kids, but many adults, now learn more from home than from sitting in any classroom. But I'm not saying that should be the only model, obviously. In terms of bang for the buck, investing in computers, projectors, access to cyberspace is a no-brainer. You give students a huge library that could not be reproduced as a physical brick and mortar library, for any reasonable cost. Plus you can still have your physical library of course (it's not either/or). > Frankly, I'd love to find a way to fit computers in, but between the chess > tournaments, the model building, the old Life magazines - there just > doesn't seem to be time. > > Art I understand that different schools systems and administrators will have different priorities. Getting one computer hooked to the Internet, and that computer hooked to a projector, would be my initial goal for a school, then for each classroom, then computers for each student -- perhaps laptops they can take home. Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
