This ain't your grandmother's back to school night!

It amazes me how much things have changed over the years. Now I'm no spring chicken, but I certainly don't consider myself old. Well, not usually. Last night I felt like an old fart at my daughter's back to school night. She's in middle school (7th grade), and the technology they are using nowadays simply amazed me. Granted, I'm pretty tech savvy, but when I think back to my classroom days, I recall the teachers writing on chalkboards, and the students using giant textbooks and things like dictionaries and encyclopedias to look up information.

Last night the teachers used smart-boards. I'm not sure if you know what these are, but they basically connect to a computer and project material onto a giant screen. The screen is actually a touch screen that the teachers use to navigate around during their lesson. I was amazed as my daughter's math teacher showed us how she works her way through the online version of the student's pre-Algebra textbook. She even showed us an online help feature in which the click of a button (or in her case a finger tap), enabled a virtual assistant to speak as well as write on the screen to help solve a problem. How cool!

One of the library assistants made the comment that this generation does not even know what an encyclopedia is. How crazy is that?! It is the reality though. All three of my children will not know a world pre-Google, pre-Facebook or pre-Twitter. Its pretty amazing when you think about it. But it just made me feel like a dinosaur so I try not to think about it ....