Potential in all it's unattainability

Freshman year, in College Writing 101, I wrote a paper about e-literacy and it's dangers in the world of student research. The danger it poses is not because of the internet's tendency to be an unreliable source, or that research from books is so much more credible, or that the internet is just so full of distractions that students will never be able to focus.  The danger is that students are not taught how to effectively research online and find credible sources. A lot of the research I looked at included detailed studies about students who simply use google and just choose from the top search results.  What students aren't told is that the top google search results are merely those that viewed or used the most, that the ones that provide the most information about the search topic or that are the most credible. Because honestly, wikipedia is almost always going to be in the top search results and it is neither the most informational nor the most credible source.  Websites can also pay google to place their site in the top search results so that they receive more publicity and activity.  However, if students were given just a few simple instructional sessions on how to research online, how to cross reference sources, how to check credibility, and how to access the vast amounts of viable knowledge that can be found on the internet, then their research projects and papers could become vastly superior to those of our parents who used typewriters and periodical catalogs.

I started recalling all of this information while reading Kajder who discovers that social media and new technologies are being used in the classrooms, but are really just sort of thrown in there to look pretty and don't actually add to much to the learning environment.  Several people have mentioned this in class. Schools invest in ipads and smart boards but the ipads are only used to search online for certain class sessions and the smartboards are only used for power points! This is sort of like having the world wide web at your hands and just using the top google results. These tools have so much potential to add to the learning experience of the classroom.  They should be an automatic "go to" when we are searching for ways to make a lesson multimodal or simply more interactive.  But they often end up being just for show.  My high school recieved a grant to put smartboards in the "classrooms of the future" which were the basic subjects such as math, history, english etc. My English teacher only turned on the smartboard on at the end of the year when we were using power point for our research presentations. It was a complete waste. But I still do not know how she could've used that specific technology to enhance our learning.

There is so much evidence in our own experiences and in what we are reading that the technology out there could be very useful for a classroom of igeneration students, but still I have not learned HOW to use it. I grow increasingly worried that I will be left with this knowledge of potential with no way to reach it or even begin to grasp at it.