The NET Generation Speaks Out!

Their experience on the UN project:

• I'm learning more about it than just looking at a textbook or an encyclopedia.
• It gives us information that we wouldn't have found anywhere but in a textbook - which is boring.
• You canfind things on a computer a lot easier than you would in a textbook.
• I have the Internet at home and I use it a lot.
• Some of the schools don't have the Internet. It's pretty important to have the Internet because then you can learn by having fun and not just by reading the textbook.
• You can choose what you read instead of the people who print the books and to tell you what you can read.
• It shows you what to click on and everything and the information just comes up.
• A five-year-old could do it. It's easy!
• We looked up all of this information on the Internet and now we are going to put it together. We're supposed to write a letter to the Secretary General saying why they should keep our committee in the UN because by the Year 2000 since they are on a limited budget they are going to delete thirty committees [a problem posed by this UN project]. We're supposed to think of a problem and write how we would respond to it . . . and what else are we supposed to do?
• . . we re supposed to write an encyclopedia entry telling all about our group and everything that our committee does.

Class Discussion after work in the lab on the UN project:

Scott: Comments about what you just did? Good. Bad. So-so. What do you have to say?

Paige: I thought it was interesting. I enjoyed it.

Scott: Did you? Tell me what you liked?

Paige: I enjoyed looking up different committees and finding things that you really want to know about.

Scott: Because this was real stuff, right? It wasn't make-believe.

Lucas: I liked it because it was a little bit faster than looking it up in our textbooks. Some things take a long time.

Kelly: We got to look up stuff for ourselves. We were in charge of looking up stuff for our own selves instead of having a teacher say, "Okay, you have to do this. And you have to do all of this." But we could do it by ourselves.

Scott: I wasn't looking over your shoulders the whole time, was I?