About
Please find here 5-minute tips for technology tools that I hope will be truly useful in elementary education.
The blog title comes from Edith Nesbit’s child’s tale called The Magic City. In her magic city, if you wish for a tool of any sort, then — voila! — the tool appears. But this magic comes at a price: if you wish for a tool, you are also bound to use it. I find this thought instructive in a world where educators are sometimes, unhappily, measured by how many new tools — Twitter, social networks, wikis, and more — they use in their classrooms.
There are hundreds of blogs on technology in education, and all of them exhort you to try new tools in your classroom — because our children purportedly have different minds, because they will need skills that other generations apparently didn’t need so much, because the best educators use them, or just because the tools are wondrous inventions. I find myself only an occasional believer in these partially-supported claims, but I suppose nonetheless this blog is another such exhortation.
Here is what I truly believe: the tools are indeed wondrous. Sometimes you can see these wonders right away, and sometimes you need to work with a tool a bit to unlock its powers. I hope you will take some time to explore these tools and then use them because — and only when — they help you to unlock doors to significant learning that wasn’t otherwise possible.
Terry Dash
Director of Technology, The Pike School
Andover, Massachusetts
From The Magic City by Edith Nesbit
‘Yes,’ said Lucy with firmness. ‘You just say, “I wish I had a machine to draw up water for eight hours a day.” That’s the proper length for a working day. Father says so.’ …
Lucy waited, breathless with hope and fear, as the Great Sloth blundered back into the inner room of its temple. … Then more sounds of creaking and the sound of metal on metal. … The room that had been full of feather-bed was now full of wheels and cogs and bands and screws and bars. It was full, in fact, of a large and complicated machine. And the handle of that machine was being turned by the Great Sloth itself.
‘Let me go,’ said the Great Sloth, gnashing its great teeth. ‘I won’t work!’
‘You must,’ said a purring voice from the heart of the machinery. ‘You wished for me, and now you have to work me eight hours a day. It is the law’; it was the machine itself which spoke.
