Chapter 10 and Epilogue

I thought this Chapter was a great wrap up to the book that I read. It did a great job of bringing everything together, and stating the main points that the author wanted to get across. The two main trends in the use of technology were stated as that more and more content is being added to the web very fast, and that more an more of the content on the Internet is collaborative. One quote that I found to be very interesting was, "If we fail to graduate students who are not able to create, sustain, and participate in these networks in a safe, ethical, and effective ways, we've done them a disservice." I think that this statement is so true. We as teachers need to realize that technology is the way our society is going. If we don't incorporate technology into our classrooms, we aren't doing our jobs because students won't be going out into the world prepared for what they will face. Even if some teachers don't want to change their ways of doing things without technology, they have to realize that in this day and age it is so crucial to the success of our students.

This chapter also discussed many shifts that we as teachers need to recognize in order to best educate our students. These shifts include things like the open content that the web has to offer, the opportunity for 24/7 learning, the construction of collaborative and meaningful knowledge, that teaching is a conversation and not a lecture, to know "where" learning, that reading means more than just being a reader, the web and its use as a notebook, that writing is no longer limited to text, that mastery is in the product, not the test, and lastly that contribution, not completion, is the ultimate goal in learning. Teachers need to consider these important ideas when they prepare their students for the real world. Teachers need to connect their students, they need to be content creators, collaborators and coaches for their students. They need to test out the technologies first, and make sure they know what they are doing before they tell the students to do it. I think it sounds like a challenge, but it is something that I am willing to do for my students!

I also thought that the Epilogue was very interesting. This teacher used so many technologies that made his life so much easier! I think it would take a lot of organization and planning to run a classroom like this, but I think it would be time well spent. Having such an organized classroom kept everyone involved in the class updated on what was going on. Everything was current too, which is relate able to the students. Overall, I thought this was a very cool organizational way of running a class!