New thinking that I have after class today!

We started out class today discussing if we were more like a technology enthusiast or a technology skeptic. I found myself right in the middle of the two groups. I can side with both sides for different reasons, but as we discussed in class, that is fine. The discussion leaders led us in a discussion about technology skeptics. We discussed a lot of the ways in which technology can fail or how it can take away from the person to person interaction. Someone brought up an example of how technologies change so fast and how they can be outdated and never used again once they are replaced. Such as a compass being replaced by a GPS. It is such an ever changing area, so this leads to teachers having to be very flexible and willng to learn and incorporate new technologies in the classroom. I don't think I will ever be strictly an entusiast because I still believe in the importance of face to face discussion and the thought that the teacher is there do help and be a positive role model in the students' lives with more than just academics. One other thing that we talked about that I think was important for my presentation is how to have more than just student to teacher discussion and have more discussion beween the students. We then went over how to create an interactive whiteboard lesson. I first need to find a WI Model Academic standard that I want to use for my lesson. I want to use the SMART exchange website to find ideas for my lesson because the website looks really creative with their lessons! I am excited to create my own interactive white board lesson!

Chapter 3 of Rethinking Education

There were actually a lot of points that I agreed with the skeptics in this chapter compared to the last chapter on the technology enthusiasts. One quote that really stood out to me was on page 48, "School Fosters just-in-case learning while technology fosters just-in-time learning." They say that the idea behind schooling is to teach students the things that they will need later in life. Technology skeptics believe that technology stresses the point to learn what you want when you need it. To an extent I can really agree with the skeptics. I think that the traditional structure of schooling is to teach students important things that they wouldn't learn on their own. These topics are important for later in their lives. Whereas if technology overtakes the schooling, and students get to decide what they learn about, I think that they will be missing out on a lot of important things. For example if I had the choice to not learn about American Politics in school, I probably wouln't have. The fact that I had an expert teach me about it and use examples that I could relate to, I got really interested in Politics.

There were also a lot of barriors to using technology in schools that were discussed in this chapter. One of the main ones is the cost and access to computers. Computers are expensive, and not every student has the access to one of them at home. There are also schools that don't have enough funding to give every student a large amount of use on the computers. It really isn't fair to the students who don't have as much access to computers as their classmates do. Technology can also disrupt classroom management. Computers can be distracting, espeically if not all of the students are on them at the same time. The clicking of the keyboard and the mouse can make it hard for other students to focus. Also goup work on computers tend to lead to a loud and chaotic classroom. Teachers are also there to teach information to the students that computers cannot. Like the book said, "The best teachers inspire their students to believe in themselves , and to work hard to accomplish their goals." I, in no way, think that computers are more important than teachers to a student's learning. I agree with the skeptics that technolgy based learning takes away from the richness of the classroom instruction and interaction. All in all, I think that technology should be included in the classroom but it shouldn't take away from the general idea of schooling.

What I Got Out of Today's Class!

We first listened to the discussion on the enthusiasts point of view on technology. We then discussed the things that went well and things that could have been improved on during the discussion that was led three of our classmates. I learned during this discussion that whenever a link is posted, you need to be signed out of the site that you are using so it isn't in edit mode anymore. Some good things to do when giving the presentation is to have a good introduction, interaction, and a conclusion. To also have a back-up plan in case something goes wrong. We also talked about how to search effectively searching. This related to the activity that we were assigned last wee. Google Advace is a nice tool to use to make your searches more effective. We also leared more about SMARTboards. Professor Boyer shared with us a really cool website that had different SMARTboard lessons that we can use as future educators. These lessons can be 381 course. downloaded for free, which is a cool resource to use. I think that I really want to use this for my Education  I really hope that I can have a SMARTboard in my classroom some day! There are just so many fun things to do on them! I thought this was a very imformative class session!

Chapter 2 of Rethinking Education

This chapter focused on the enthusiast argument on the role that technology should play in today's classrooms. Enthusiasts believe that teachers should be using the technology of the 21st century to teach our students than to continue to use 19th century techniques. They believe that any type of technology that can be used instead of a textbook or lecture should be. Everything in our world is changing with technology, including the way we think about things. When students are assigned a research paper, pretty much all of them will use the internet as thier first resources. This is just one example of how our lives are dramatically going toward more technological based tools. I have no doubt that this society is changing, but I still don't agree completly with the enthusiast view discussed in this chapter. Yes I think it is important for students to be able to enhance their learning through some computer use, but I don't think that this is the only thing that they should be doing. The part of this chapter that discussed video games really didn't sit well with me. They say that a student playing Madden is teaching more math than a teacher teaching their students math. They say that self-guided exploration is currently out of reach of our current schooling system. I would disagree with this because I think their is a time and place for self-guided discovery. I don't think a child's whole schooling should be them sitting on a computer, with the computer telling them what to do. I think this takes away a lot of important communication and other skills that should be taking place in the classroom. As a future teacher, I plan on including lessons that have my students explore and discover new things on their own, but not soley on the computer. There are far more other ways to teach than just with technology. I will always make sure that my students get their technology fix and understanding in, but I still believe in a lot of traditional schooling. There are still some teachers that refuse to use technolgy in their classroom, and this I can see a problem with. However, for completely basing school off of the computer I don't see myself doing in the future.

Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts Chapters 1-3

After reading these very interesting Chapters, I came away with new learning and new ideas for my future classroom. With technology becoming so abundant in our society, I think it is so important that it is incorporated in the classroom. One of the ideas that I really enjoyed was how I could use a personal blog as a teacher and keep track of successes and failures. I think this would be beneficial for me to see where I have come as an educator, and things that worked well and those things that didn't. Maybe my experiences could help other teachers as well. I also learned that if special technological tools are being brought into the classroom that they need to be tested by the teacher in great depth before the students get to use them! You want to make sure there are as little complications as possible!

One of the items discussed was how students could create a blog for class, much like this one. I think it is a cool way for students to work on their typing skills and to get some internet experience. It was also discussed how blogs can be used as an online filing cabinet, leaving out the possibility of losing paper copies of important papers. I think it would be so cool to have the students use blogs as their daily reflective journals too. Another neat idea was to have a collaborative space that all of the classmates can write on together. They can share their ideas and essentially learn from each other! I also know that I want to use a blog or a wiki to have an updated schedule of what goes on during the day in my class. Not only for the students, but for thier parents as well.

This book contains some useful informaion on how to use blogging in the classroom. There are instructions on how to set up the blogs, and the importance of how students need to start with small steps when they are introduced to this new concept. It also stresses the importance of using internet safety with students. I think when blogging is used right in the classroom, it can really add to the class and make it very exciting for the students!

Growing Up Online

Even though I am part of the group that has "Grown Up Online," this video was still shocking. It is crazy to think that these teens think that the only place that they can be themselves is when they are online. The one girl in the video who acted happy go lucky in school and was very intellegent said that the only place where she could talk about her eating disorder was online. She would go on websites to discover ways to be anorexic, and how to make things like purging less horrible. Her parents had no idea about any of her issues, only her online friends did. Another story that shocked me was the online bullying of a kid named Ryan that ended up in him taking his own life. One of the breaking points of this kids decisions was when a popular girl in school flirted with  him online and then said later that she was just putting on an act, leaving him humiliated. It is hard to know how to trust someone online. The stories about girls sending naked pictures to boys they don't even know over the internet are just disgusting. It's had to imagine that these kids think that this type of behavior is ok and that it is safe. These kids find it far too easy to lie to their parents about this type of thing. As a teen, I felt like I could share mostly anything with my parents, because I had nothing to hide. I have parents that give me space, but not enough space where they wouldn't interfere if they knew something suspicious was going on with me.

Other internet worries lie in the way that students are using the internet for their education. Far too many students are relying on websites like Spark Notes to get a summary of their class readings without actually reading the books, which is totally defeating the purpose. Teachers need to find ways like to make students write essays in class to make sure that students are really doing the work without relying on these internet sites. I also think it is really important for educators to use things like turnitin.com to see if students are turning in original work. It's  really kind of sad that teachers have to take all of these precautions to make sure that their students are really putting a good amount of effort into their school work.

I think that it is so important for teachers to teach their students how to be safe on the internet. It is ridiculous to think that we can ban students from things like Facebook and My Space. The main thing we need to accomplish is to find a way to get it through to students on how to use these websites with caution. Things like only adding friends on Facebook that you already know could work. This eliminates most of the worry about them being an online predator. One bad judgement could lead to something horrible that could change a student's life forever. Overall, I thought this was such an interesting video that I would reccommend to anyone interested or concerned with inappropriate internet use.

What New Thinking I have After Today's Class!

After today's class, I came away with some new and helpful ideas about technology. One of these things that sticks out to me is the most important way to deduce if a website is credible, which is to use triangular. This means to compare the information on one website with others like it to see if the information matches up. If the website you have been looking at has information that doesn't match up with a lot of the other websites on the same topic, then it is most likely not a good site to use. Another way to decide if a website has credible information would be to look into the author. If you can find information on the author that gives him or her some credibility, then it is probably good to use. Other things like the date, the most common being the most recent, give information on if the website should be used. Another thing we talked about in class today was how to use the SMARTboard. There are some really cool things to use on the board that can add to presentations not only for now during school, but for my future as an educator.  I also really enjoyed the discussion that we had today on the topic of the importance of technology in today's schools. The discussion forum was really neat, and it is something that I would use again. We had to respond to the statements by standing either in the agree group, the disagree group, or in the undecided group.This was a good way to see where my fellow classmates stood on some reallly interesting questions on how important it will be for us as future educators to use technology in our classrooms. It was overall a really informational class period!