Monday, December 10, 2007

See Dick. See Jane. Click. Click.

It was comprised of boxes, circles, squares, arrows and stars. Even two eyes and a smile.

It looked a lot like a male version of the full-time maid that lived with the Jetsons.

The class assignment?

Duplicate it on the computer sitting in front of you. No specific how to’s or instructions. Just do it.

And do it they did.

Within about 10 minutes, there were custom versions that were pretty damn close to the one up on the screen in the front of the class.

Last week I directed a film shoot for a Podcast video that will be airing soon on You Tube. We were filming the head of the school board in a town with a population of about 6,000 people located at the very southern tip of the Appalachian Mountains.

We were in a computer lab with about two-dozen first graders at one of the elementary schools. This was their computer class that they went to several times a week.

I can vaguely remember when I was in first grade. Our classroom lives seemed to evolve around Dick and Jane and Spot, Columbus and 1492 and multiplication tables. The most creative we got was doing papier-mâché pumpkins for Halloween.

It wasn’t until I was in the fourth grade that I even interacted with electronics and it involved learning the Morse Code to get a novice Ham radio license.

These first graders are just a small sampling of the leading edge of the ZOOM generation. They can do things with computers that seems to come naturally…things that Boomers and Xers are still figuring out how to do.

Last Christmas, I bought my 8 month old niece a computer designed just for babies. It featured shapes, colors, characters and sounds. Thea now knows words and can even create sentences and questions.

Generation ZOOM may not ever be as big as the Boomers or the Millenniums, but as their nickname implies, they are going to advance further and quicker with technology than we can even imagine!

WOW!

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