Net Smart

After reading Net Smart by Howard Rheingold, I would say this book encompasses everything we have been discussing these past few weeks. I felt that it was closely linked to Information Diet. Rheingold mentions five literacies, attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration and network smarts. With each, he goes into great detail and gives several examples of them.  The one that stands out to me is attention  because it’s something I feel I deal with every day. My middle school is a 1 to 1 program and every time the kids walk through my door and sit down they immediately open their Chromebooks. I find myself saying each time they walk in ‘Chromebooks are closed”. Even when I have them working on an assignment with the Chromebooks, if I want to add a piece I can tell which ones are not paying attention because they have this glassy eyed look while staring at their screens. As a teacher, I’m now competing with the very technology I introduced to peak their interest. Rheingold wrote that while we are obsessed with technology we can still train our attention and teach our students how to train their attention.

In order to be able to teach my students how to train their attention, I really need to understand where I focus my attention. Most everything I do is now on the computer or the internet. That’s how I pay bills, create lessons, watch tv and communicate with my family. I am constantly connected and rarely find myself not. I have noticed that I can’t even sit still long enough to watch a movie or show without pulling my phone out. Usually, it’s to look something up about what I am watching but still my attention is never fully focused on one thing anymore.  I have a friend who is a nurse for an ophthalmologist, she told me that most people do not blink when they are scrolling through their phones, which is, in turn, causing eye dryness. How bizarre that our attention is so focused on what we are looking at on our phones we don’t even stop to blink!

While attention really stood out with me I do feel that Rheingold’s other literacies are just as important to creating a population of ‘net smart’ and net savvy users. When we teach and model the five literacies for our students we are creating a new well-rounded technology smart group of students.