My students are excited and scared.
“Mr. T,” Estaphany asks, “does it really cost $25 to get a laptop?”
“Not really. Your laptop is a $1200 model, but the insurance for it is $25 in case you drop it. Sort of like the insurance on your iPhone.”
“But what if I don’t want a laptop?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Mr. T, at my house, there is no such thing as personal property,” she quips, looking down at her shoes. “My sisters and I all share one room and if I don’t hold my phone in my hand, they will pick it up and start Instagramming. If I get a laptop, everyone in the house will want to use it.”
“Estephany, maybe that’s part of the idea,” I reply, trying to calm her emotions. “Maybe the laptop program will help families get digital.”
“But we’re already digital, with our phones,” she answers.
“That’s a point well taken, but the phone is not really a device of production, is it? Mostly it’s for consumption of media and limited output.”
“Huh?”
“You’ll see how powerful life will become with the laptop.”
“Will I?”
TEACHER TRANSFORMATION – FROM PRINT TO DIGITAL
So this summer I bought a Kindle, after polling my Millennial Alumni on Facebook. “How do you all read text?” I posted to my 20-odd students who graduated back in the 00s and were now out in the workforce.
“At work, obviously we read online,” Sarah posted.
“At home, I read on the Kindle,” said Chris.
“Kindle, Kindle, Kindle,” the comment section spoke.
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s rich with text features, like an online dictionary and direct access to Wiki,” Ira posted. “Just highlight a word or phrase and you can instantly get definitions and references.”
Another alumnus chimed in, “And it builds a vocabulary database of words you are learning.”
Now the thread was getting long, “Mr T, you don’t have a Kindle yet?”
“Okay,” I surrendered, “Which one should I buy?”
Well, I won’t bore you with the back and forth, but suffice to say that I just wanted it to read books, not watch YouTube. The Kindle Paperwhite won out and at $100, it was a bargain, thus the adventure began as I started downloading books and reading them digitally.