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=About Me =

Welcome to my virtual notebook. My name is Paul Degenkolb, and I am nearing the end of my fourth year as a French teacher at Malden High School. My job combines three of my passions: languages, teaching and community service. As part of the Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century Classroom course this summer, I am hoping to learn more about making language learning even more exciting by creating interactive lessons that incorporate technology in the classroom. I also look forward to enjoying landscapes like the one below this summer as I reflect on past lessons and look forward to the future. Thank you for visiting my notebook page.

 I love Maine!

**2.1: The 21st Century Classroom**

This article presents statistics to corroborate a general impression that seems to have become accepted fact: times are changing, and with those changes come new ways of receiving and exchanging information. Certainly the boom of the internet and of Google, its most popular search engine, have revolutionized the way that people look for information. I remember as a kid being mesmerized by the vastness of the card catalog. Once I got to high school, the power of CD-ROM encyclopedias was at once mystifying and magical. The relative ease of typing a few words into a search engine, however, blows these now archaic systems out of the water. Is this really any surprise? It seems as though there is always something new and incredible around the corner to revolutionize and perhaps simplify daily life.

After reading through the statistics, what was more surprising to me was the dramatic increase in the number of books published and the relatively modest slide in the number of written letters sent. Although I am very keen to learn cutting-edge ways of updating and upgrading my classroom and teaching style, I am also a pretty cautious person, and I hope that we are not throwing the proverbial baby out with the bath water. There's nothing quite like holding a crisp newspaper on a Sunday morning or catching the musty but comforting aroma of an old library book. Call me old-fashioned, but that's how I feel.

As for the implications and connections to my own classroom and my 21st century vision, the most striking thing to me here is the shockingly rapid growth of the internet and its influence over the past decade or so and its relatively unknown impact. We know that the way we are receiving information is changing, but do we really understand how our ways of processing information are changing? And what about impressionable youngsters (or clueless adults)? Are they retaining the information that they read? Do they understand that not everything that they read is Gospel swear-on-your-great-grandmother's-grave fact? We have a responsibility here to learn and to share strategies for determining what is a reputable source and to help our students develop a sense of ethics when using the internet.

As a parting question, is anyone else alarmed by the more than doubling of the number of clowns? Definitely not okay.