Approaching a New Year

Since my earliest blog entry, I have tried to maintain a balanced perspective regarding educational technology. Even though many of my posts generally address the potential benefits from the use of technology in teaching and how the use of technology as a learning tool opens up multitudinous opportunities for students, I would like to think that I have always remained aware of the problems and concerns associated with the integration of technology into the classroom. As I continue to read more books and articles about educational technology and even more blog posts from tech gurus, I think I will need to begin investing more time in searching for articles that address the pitfalls. A little more than a month ago a fellow blogger and I were having a conversation on David Warlick’s blog reply board, and he had said that when teachers become overly infatuated with any instructional strategy or educational technology tool, they quickly lose a facet essential to the creation and sustaining of effective teaching, healthy criticism. The ability to step back and evaluate teaching practices and tools is important to remember as many of us “digital immigrants” become attracted to the glitz and glamour of Web 2.0.

Asking questions would help professional educators to remain engaged in conversations regarding the usability and functionality of new tools as technological advancements arrive to our computer screens, but what questions should we be asking ourselves as we consider the place of technology in our teaching? Foremost, I believe teachers should continue to think about learning objectives and unit plans before thinking about which new Web 2.0 tool they want to incorporate in next week’s lesson plan. Technology should not be a teacher’s solution to every problem; in fact, teachers should always ask themselves if there is a better way of conveying a particular concept or teaching a certain skill. Technology will not always be the most efficient method of instruction. Additionally, before teachers and IT departments begin writing grants for the next wave of digital projectors or audio recording devices, they should reexamine the tools they already have and see whether there exist other ways to utilize them. Last week, a man discovered how to use a Nintendo Wii remote to create a device similar to that of a SmartBoard.

Wii Remote as Interactive Whiteboard

I wonder if the technology sitting in our schools right now have multiple functions that we are unaware of. Continuing this thread of multi-functionality, teachers should ask what cross-curricular or multi-literacy skills are being enhanced by using technology in the classroom. Technology certainly develops literacy—after all, Web 2.0 is a read/write interface, but how do teachers trace the progress associated with technology? If teachers want to use technology, then I hope they research the tool and get involved with discussions about it.

The list of questions and concerns surrounding educational technology will inevitably grow as more technologically-advanced generations of students move through the educational system and demand technology in the classroom. I will forever urge my colleagues to remain involved in the unfolding of technology, especially as it relates to education. Am I asking everyone to create avatars in Second Life? No. Do I want all of my colleagues to join me in writing a MAC twittory? No. All I ask is that we continue to ask questions about what is happening in the world of technology and what are the implications for education.

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Image Citation:

2Dizzylizzie. (2007, October 4). Trapped in technology. 2Dizzylizzie's Photostream. Retrieved December 31, 2007 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/14257925@N08/1484722820/

Final Blog Reflection - Week of December 17th

Teaching with Technology has simply been an amazing experience. The readings, discussions, and projects have all contributed to an insatiable thirst for learning about technology. While I am in the program, I hope to treat my classroom as a safe environment in which to integrate some of the tools I have learned about and researched on my own. While there is still much to learn from my side, I am comfortable with using technology in the classroom as a novice and enabling students to become teachers for their peers and myself.

Although my blog began because of a graduate class, it will not end because the semester has come to a close. At the very least, I think our blogs can serve as regular modes of communication for my colleagues and me as we enter the classrooms full-time in less than a month. Let’s face it, our lives are going to remain busy – just a different kind of busy in comparison to last semester, and I know a lot of us would like to remain aware of each other’s developments.

Keep hope alive! Continue to post!

Blog Reflection - Week of December 3rd

I’ve recently found a new interest. Although it does include reading, it is a step away from biographies and fictional narratives. After mulling over which Web 2.0 tool to integrate into my class this spring for weeks, I have finally settled on one: blogs. Classroom blogging seems to be the most user-friendly Web 2.0 tool, and once I teach my students the basics, I can begin to show them how to use some of the other Web 2.0 tools that can utilize blogs, for example, podcasts, RSS feeders, etc.

Blogs are certainly a learning tool that offers students ways of expressing themselves in public, yet potentially private, spaces, and I think students will really enjoy the publishing aspect of the tool. By having students post their work in a public domain, they are enabling more of their peers to read the writings. As I begin to think about how to best incorporate this tool in the English classroom, I imagine I will have students post smaller assignments as opposed to five paragraph essays. In addition, students will be required to read the posts of their peers and make constructive comments. While I do not foresee this exchange becoming an editing workshop, I believe feedback at any level is better than no feedback. Finally, using a strong RSS reader, like Google Reader, I will be able to track the work of and interaction between my students.

Professional edublogger Will Richardson seems to suggest classroom blogs can help prepare students with the appropriate literacies to enter the job markets of the future. I believe classroom blogging has the potential to engage students on multiple levels. For the low-achieving students, they may only wish to add text or, perhaps, the freedom to add pictures and video will spark interests and enable them to excel. For the high-achieving students, the potential of blogs as far as layout, add-ons, and input feeds are seemingly limitless. Blogs can be as simple or intricate as the author wants.

For further readings about the capabilities of blogs in educational settings, I would recommend the books of Will Richardson, Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms, and David Warlick, Classroom blogging. I am currently reading both, and I find each of them incredible helpful as I begin to frame how I see blogs operating in my classroom. I would also recommend subscribing to their blogs.

Before I leave today, I want to dispel a common misconception about using the Web as an educational tool and how it relates to blogs. Parents are often worried about whether their children are in danger when they use the Internet because most parents associate the Internet with online predators, but Blogger has security settings in order prevent this type of abuse; in fact, you can set up one classroom blog with multiple authors and treat the blog more like a wiki in order to have less data to manage. Also, sometimes educators worry about anonymous peer-to-peer bullying, but Blogger has additional proactive steps to prevent this as well in the settings.

The only thing I can ask of my colleagues is to give classroom blogging a chance – experiment with it.

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Image Citation:

Helmond, A. (2007). Google and Blogger, please stop localizing me! Retrieved December 6, 2007 from http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/wp02/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/blogger01.png

Trimester Scheduling made in iMovie

Blog Reflection - Week of October 21st

Although we are only halfway through the second semester of our graduate studies, I hope to rekindle wearying spirits. With sighs of exhaustion and frustration in the air, David Warlick reminds us this week how important love is to our central drive as teachers. He suggests that loving one’s job and teaching with heart are especially important in the field of education. “There is so much about teaching and learning that is about communication. And it seems to me that when communication has heart behind it, then it becomes especially sticky.” I agree.

Passion and excitement are contagious, and I believe if we show students how wonderful and captivating our subject matters, then we can spread the good infection of learning. I contend that technology in the classroom is one way to ease this process. Technology can spark that ember of intrigue, and once we have captured the interest of our students, we can begin to shape their perceptions.

I believe a love for teaching entails a love for technology. As the students of the next generation become evermore aware and confident in the technological skills, we must remain engaged in educational technology so that we can still teach them something novel, and above all educational. Four months ago, I never would have dreamed that podcasting was something I could do. A month ago, I never would have considered a cell phone a educational technology tool. Before the program, I thought wikis and blogs were reserved for politics or techies. I am simply amazed at how much I have learned in the past months about technology and how it can be utilized in the class.

Fellow colleagues, I hope your heart is still in education despite whatever has happened in your cognates, placements, or education courses. Also, I hope that part, at least, of your passion about teaching entertains the potential of educational technology.

Blog Reflection – Week of October 15th

David Warlick raised an interesting question this week in his blog regarding ethics and contemporary literacy. Many people, including teachers, administrators, and parents, believe teachers should incorporate an ethics lesson here and there to remind students of appropriate behavior in the cyber world. Some would quickly argue that ethics is the prerogative of philosophy, but I would contend that educators could grapple with this issue if we create parameters of investigation. General education teachers should contribute to the resolution of this inquiry, not just information technology personnel.

Warlick outlines four basic concepts in attempting to address the tension between ethics and contemporary literacy:

• Respect for intellectual property (copyright, etc.)
• Respect for intellectual integrity (respect truth)
• Respect for each other (cause no harm)
• Respect for the information infrastructure

Each one of these concepts deserves much thought and an adequate response, which I will leave a few of these to my colleagues. For my purposes, I would like to address the third area of focus: respect for each other.

The most prominent classroom rule in middle and high schools across the country is probably a simple, although often tested, one: respect each other. We ask students to respect each other’s space, feelings, beliefs, etc., and we usually teach students some of the skills that are necessary in honoring this classroom rule. In addition, we often reward students that practice these skills and punish those who exercise inappropriate conduct. Should we not do the same thing in cyberspace?

On the Internet, blogs, wikis, and messages from Facebook and MySpace each provide students a plethora of opportunities to attack other students, and with this type of freedom, I think students should be educated on proper virtual behavior. Perhaps, teachers could set up class blogs or wikis in order to teach proper virtual etiquette. Programs like Enemybook (here’s an NPR interview with the creator of the Facebook paraody) will probably expand over time, but if we teach students how to respond to such programs, they will hopefully fizzle out.

What about the other concepts? What do these mean to you? What has been left out?

Blog Reflection – Week of September 24th

This week, David Warlick once again posed a question that all of us MACers should consider as we complete our education program. With an ever-growing attention toward technology in the classroom, perhaps we should think broader about the 21st century: “But a new century, a new global economy, a new environment of personal power, and a new information and media landscape demand a new culture and even definition for education and being educated” (Warlick, 2007, paragraph 4). Recently, professional educators have been formulating a new framework to prepare future teachers, and while the framework does not, in my opinion, completely shake-up our current understanding of literacy, it does offer some tweaks. In his blog, Warlick asked his readers to address any of the three following questions:

* How would you define the 21st century teacher?
* How would you define the 21st century classroom?
* How would you define the 21st century student?

I’ll take up the first question and leave the other two to my colleagues. In defining the 21st-century teacher, I think an important characteristic to consider will be open-mindedness. Without a doubt, technology will play an integral role in the classroom of the future, and teachers must be prepared to assess these tools and incorporate them when possible. Texts will also change; in fact, some things may undergo fundamental changes, and in order to prepare for future changes, teachers must maintain an open mind.

The second part of the definition would relate to creativity. With an abundance of entertainment venues available to our students, for example, video games, the Internet, DVD players in vehicles, maintaining the focus of our students will be a difficult task. While I believe varied instructional activities and teaching methods will assist us, I think teachers will need harness their creative energies to think about how to integrate more technology into the classroom. I do not think the role of teachers should be to entertain students, but I think it is up to teachers to do whatever they can to keep the minds of their students engaged. Technology, one would think, is one tool that can help teachers succeed in this endeavor, but we must make sure not to inundate our students to the point of distraction.

Finally, teachers must remain learned in their field. Content mastery will always be, in my opinion, a prerequisite to teaching. As the field changes, I hope teachers will remain up-to-speed on what is occurring in their content area, including current research and successful teaching strategies.

Teacher: An open-minded, creative, and learned individual in charge of educating children and young adults.

Any thoughts on the classroom, student, or teacher of the 21st century?

Blog Reflection – Week of September 17th

All right, I have found a new thread to toss into the discussion of whether schools should have technology in the classroom that has the potential for student abuse. Some of our classmates would ask schools for unfiltered access to the Internet; some (especially Liz perhaps) would ask for students to have the opportunity to use their cell phones; and others would probably like to see every class equipped with electronic whiteboards. An opponent to these ideas, however, generally raises the issue of student abuse, but what would it take for students to stop abusing these forms of technology, and more broadly first-rate technology as a whole?

David Warlick, in his blog on September 25th, raises this exact question. He cites a school district in Arkansas that gave unfiltered email accounts to its students. When the technology was first offered, there were certainly students that abused the system, and each of the abusers appropriately received some type of punishment, usually a temporary ban. As the program continued on, the number of email abusers lowered, and after five years, there were no incidences of student email abuse by the semester break. At the end of his blog, Warlick asks, “But I wonder how long it takes for a new classroom technology/tool to evolve from being a new toy to play to becoming another learning tool, another part of schooling, a technology or tool to be worked?”

I would like to elaborate on two possible answers to this daunting concern. First, I think time will probably be the most important factor. As students spend more time with the technology, their initial attraction will most likely diminish, but this will enable the opportunity for students to become more attracted to its educational components. Being somewhat new to wikis and blogs this year, I have never been tempted to abuse either forms of technology, but that’s because I only recognize them as educational mediums. The more time I spend with them and the more often I see my colleagues interact with them, my understanding of their use only solidifies. One thing that I am sure concerns schools, however, is how much time is necessary. For instance, many of us realize the awesome potential of both wikis and blogs, but if a classroom of students continues to abuse them, a principal or other administrator may step in and say, “All right, that’s enough.” How do teachers who are excited and optimistic about relatively new forms of Web 2.0 instill a sense of patience within their administration? How can we convince our administrators that there are educational benefits to come?

Second, I think teachers should take it upon themselves to spend a considerable portion of time educating students about the particulars and potential of Web 2.0 technologies. I suspect that some students abuse technology because they are bored with it. Maybe a student has mastered all of the ins and outs of posting a blog – that takes, what, a whole two minutes? Perhaps, we can encourage students to take more ownership in their blogs and wikis. For instance, we can ask them to start a series of blog posts that are related to a specific topic, and we could ask them to upload at least one picture or video clip that supplements their posts. Students are capable of so much more than I am sure most of believe – let’s push them forward. If students are challenged and limited by their own creativity, I believe less abuse will occur in the virtual world.

Blog Reflection – Week of September 10th

This week I would like to weigh in on the issue of whether schools should remain on the leading edge of technology.

While many points were raised last Friday during the Point / Counterpoint Presentation, there was one type of reservation, which many people shared, that failed to convince me. A common concern among the audience was that schools should regularly attempt to ride the second wave of technology, instead of surfing on the leading wave. By focusing time and money on preparing for the second wave, some of the audience members thought school would be able to incorporate the technology more effectively. However, this thinking process seems quite Machiavellian, if not selfish. Is it fair to risk the time and effort of one school for the benefit of one’s own? If other schools struggle and flounder, is it right to use this information to satisfy one’s own “ends”?

I believe schools should always attempt to learn alongside the other schools risking their resources in order to develop the technology and methods that will increase the academic livelihood of its students. As educators, we need to think about not only what are students know by the time they leave high school but also what are they capable of learning after they leave. Our students need to be prepared to learn new skills, simplistic and advanced, and with the technological job market share exponentially growing from year to year, our students need proper training. If the world’s information base is doubling every two years as some statistics report, then teachers must focus their efforts on teaching a perpetual learner. One way that teachers can offer students a fighting chance in the future is to help them embrace the technological frontier.

On a different note, I would like to share a story about a school in Pennsylvania that David Warlick mentioned recently in his blog. In the school, each core (English, Math, Social Studies, and Science – sorry World Languages) classroom will receive the following technology and services:

• one laptop per student desk (cart of 25)
• a teacher laptop
• a printer/scanner
• imaging software
• productivity software
• a web cam
• an electronic whiteboard
• a projector
• up to three digital still cameras (per eligible school)
• up to five digital video cameras (per eligible school)
• Infrastructure (wireless network, servers)
• technical support

Imagine what we could do with these toys. The question immediately arises, however, whether too much technology in a classroom inhibits the learning process. Can all of this technology be carefully wielded? Perhaps, David can show them how.

Blog Reflection – Week of September 3rd

After my first full week of observing as a student teacher at a local high school, I am already beginning to think about how to incorporate technology into my lesson plans. Although my student placement is not on the cutting edge of technology and many of the rooms are limited to a television, a computer, and an overhead, I am confident that I can utilize the technological equipment in my classroom to its fullest potential. Part of being a good teacher is maximizing output with limited resources.

My teacher, who is also the yearbook advisor, has more Internet access than most teachers. Because of her advisory position, the school gives her a laptop cart. The laptop cart has 10 laptop computers within it, and students are free to use them at the teacher’s discretion. Each laptop has an internal wireless card, and the laptop cart emits a strong wireless signal from its own router. Most of my English classes have about 30 students, so if, and when, I include a computer component, I need to make sure that three students sharing the same computer can complete an assignment or a project. Currently, I am thinking about three-person group PowerPoint mini-presentations. This type of project would enable collaborative learning at its core, but it could also serve as an introduction to educational technology for many students.

On a slightly different note, I would like to touch upon an educational technology issue that arose today. Last night, my teacher assigned her students an assignment that asked students to go home and find a 30-second audio clip of a song from Yahoo Music. For the next couple of weeks, we are studying poetry, and the students were specifically asked to identify a poetic device in the song of their choice. When my teacher assigned the project, her computer had access to the web page, but this morning we found the web page blocked by the high school server. When I went to ask the tech support supervisor in the library to unblock the web page, no one was there.

My concern is whether students should be aloud to have full access of the Internet. Certainly, complete freedom over the World Wide Web is dangerous, but is there a better method of monitoring student access and educating students on healthy Internet use than simply blocking any website that could be “potentially” harmful. For example, Yahoo Music, in my opinion, does not seem to introduce any threats to the staff or students. At the minimum, I believe the technology department should notify staff and students when the server blocks particular websites.

Blog Reflection – Week of August 3rd

For my final blog of the summer term, I would like to tackle the following question: What seem to be important questions to be asking yourself as you consider the place of technology in your teaching?

Foremost, I believe the student-factor to be the most significant concern when thinking about the place of technology in the classroom. Students bring with them to the classroom a technological base that will mostly likely surpass that of the prior year’s students. With an ever-growing number of students embracing the Internet, surfing through cyberspace, and virtually chatting with people from around the world at earlier ages, the classroom that considers the occasional PowerPoint presentations the best implementation of technology will quickly send students into boredom. Teachers should constantly look for ways to incorporate technology into the classroom. Many of the technological teaching practices, today, include blogs and wikis, which both foster excellent collaborative learning. With a heightened perception of the capabilities of students in the classroom, teachers can encourage students to use technology as a tool to supplement their learning.

Second, I believe teachers should ask themselves how willing they are to become learners, sometimes alongside their students. When teachers begin integrating technology into the classroom, they will most likely experience unforeseen troubles, but if these teachers can comfortably approach the education-technology veterans in the field (through their blogs or wikis), stress can be avoided. Teachers can, and should, help other teachers. We are all in the same battle, the battle against ignorance. As teachers begin to use technology in their classroom on a regular basis, problems will become less frequent, but the first steps are going to be difficult – learn along the way. Be open to the possibility that you might have a student who knows more about virtual social network than yourself, it is okay.

Fellow teachers, we should look to technology as a friend. The friendship between teacher and technology will be representative of most other friendships. There will be smiles; there will be hardships; there will be laughter. Technology can become a great friend, but first, we must believe its potential.

Blog Reflection – Week of July 27th

For weeks, I have been thinking about how to incorporate podcasting effectively into my classroom. I love turning to NPR’s website and having the opportunity to replay some of my favorite podcasts, including New Horizons in Education and Car Talk, at any time of the day or night, and I often wonder whether my students of the future could ever be as interested in my own future podcasts.

From this week’s reading, I found Shawn Wheeler’s “Giving Students a Second Listen” quite encouraging. He made many interesting remarks regarding podcasting, which I think could convince many of you SMACers to give it a chance. He claimed that podcasting “would extend the learning day, change the way students review for tests and allow those students who were absent to hear the lesson” (p. 64). I believe podcasting provides many teachers to both record lectures and transfer them to accessible formats quickly and effortlessly. Once the audio clips reach the information superhighway, students could listen to them for a multitude of purposes. A student who Wheeler asked to interview other peers about the benefits of podcasting found that students utilized podcasts to “allow better understanding than reading the PowerPoint slides or worksheets” from class, provide a “second chance to hear the information due to the speed the teacher speaks or students inability to keep up while taking notes,” and to review for upcoming examinations (p. 66). The positive effects of podcasting seem endless for students, and I truly believe that podcasting will change education. Students will not be the only beneficiaries from this technological tool – oh no, teachers can also review these audio recordings to improve their teaching practices. In contrast to video records of practice, podcasting could capture audio with a fraction of the necessary space to retain the record on a personal hard drive.

Podcasting has a bright future, and I think many students could also take advantage of the hardware and software to expand their learning space. Students could work together to create an informational radio station, completely run by podcasts, or they could use it to record personal readings of their poetry or short stories. Podcasting ultimately opens the door for students to explore a new presentation format. Students in science classes could record observations in lab experiments, and world language students could utilize podcasts to practice their pronunciation.

While I a little bummed out that our new technology package is not going to include an iPod, I am optimistic about podcasting in my short future. I will find a way!

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P.s.: In recent weeks, I’ve been addressing the pitfalls of virtual social networks, and while I think youths that create alternative personas in cyberspace are in need of help and protection from their parents, this video brought a smile to my face. You country music and Seinfeld fans out there, take a couple of minutes out of your busy lives.

Blog Reflection – Week of July 20th

Neil Postman (2000) raises excellent questions regarding the impact of technology and the purpose of schools, and while each set of questions deserves pages of commentary, I would like to consider a single aspect from each of them. With regards to technology, I want to examine the effects of virtual social interaction; in examining schools, I would like to discuss an important concept Postman fails to acknowledge in his article.

First, I believe technology has recently introduced a range of mediums in which people can interact with people locally and around the world. Postman worries younger children may become lost in virtual worlds, but how enticing are these virtual realities? Many people, especially college students, have active accounts with Facebook, MySpace, and/or instant messaging servers (e.g., AOL, G-mail, etc.). A concern I have about these social networks is that they can cause users to become obsessed in a virtual world. Foremost, I have seen many college students lose hours to checking their status (and their friends’ through “news feed”) on Facebook, chatting with friends on various instant messaging services, and viewing random MySpace pages. If people overly invest themselves into these virtual worlds, they may lose touch with the necessary behaviors required in face-to-face interactions. I do not deny that each of these networks is capable of providing a community, but how powerful is a community of strangers connected by a shred of similarity? Of course, I do not challenge the force of a community of strangers brought together for a common cause, but people with similar interests in movies, music, locations, and comical groups generally construct the pieces of these networks. We must urge the younger generation that the virtual world is a means to a greater end. It is a tool that when wielded with care and direction can provide a pathway to create positive change.

Second, the amount of information available to students outside of the classroom greatly surpasses that within it, but Postman urges us to consider the social values that will be lost if young children do not enter schools to learn from cooperative learning. While I agree with Postman’s concern, in addition to being an opponent to at-home schooling, he fails to acknowledge the ability teachers have to construct working schemes to organize the information. Parents who have experience in education may be able to prepare their children to categorize knowledge better than most, but teachers are professionally trained to assist students in acquiring these skills. What good is a plethora of knowledge when students have no concept of how to organize it, in order to retrieve it later when necessary? How much will a child be able to learn about mathematics, literature, science, and the arts without a way to make connections across subject areas? Schools, especially teachers, help facilitate this process, and if schools are ever eliminated, parents should probably earn a teaching certificate before having children.

In my classroom, I want to introduce technology as often as I can, but I will remain aware of my reservations regarding the potential abyss of virtual social networks. With the use of wikis and blogs, students can learn the collaborative skills that will aid them in their futures. Teachers –
Web 2.0 can be our friends. Let us embrace it – but be cautious.

Postman, N. (2000). Some new gods that fail. San Francisco: The Jossey-Bass Reader on Technology and Learning, 289-298.

P.s.: With EDUC 504, we can enter the classroom more prepared than many other teachers (see David Warlick’s post on July 26^th, “First Year Teachers”).

30 Second Storyboard

Blog Reflection - Week of July 13th

This week I want to return to one of John Dewey’s comments regarding education: “I believe that education thus conceived marks the most perfect and intimate union of science and art conceivable in human experience” (p. 8). If this true, which I hope it is, then I want to elaborate a little bit on what this belief may mean for me.

In my classroom, I hope to present a wide range of the arts, including literature, paintings, video, music, and many more, to my students. While I have a strong preference toward novels, short stories, poems, and dramas, I believe many other forms of art can help supplement my lesson plans. I can accept the fact that not all students are going to approach literature with the same passion as I do, but perhaps, I can engage them by other means. Too often, I think English teachers forget how to incorporate other forms of the arts into the classroom, and consequently, they miss a great opportunity to broaden students’ conceptualization of the arts and risk losing students’ interest in the overall notion of the arts.

From my experience as a mathematics teacher, I have also seen the adverse effects of thinking within a narrow framework. Most students take mathematics courses out of obligation, and they find the content of the course extremely disconnected from their immediate world, causing a lack of interest to develop quickly. In order to reach these students and capture their curiosity, mathematics teachers need to spend more time finding real-world examples. The dreaded question for many teachers is “If I am never going to use this, then why do I need to learn it,” but choosing homework problems and creating projects that ask students to transform their conceptual and procedural knowledge into more sophisticated systems of knowledge can help prevent this common high school query.

Luckily, I will be able to practice in both the fields of science and art, but not every teacher is going to have the accreditation to bridge this gap. Is this a problem? Can teachers in one of the fields foster learning environments that ask students to think as though they were part of the other field? Of course. Within the union of science and art lies a fundamental objective that all teachers can attain: encourage students to think critically and creatively. Technology will help all educators bridge the gap more successfully. With the use of blogs, wikis, and other techno-savvy mediums, teachers can empower students to approach collaboratively content-specific problems. These mediums have the capacity to help students work with each other and teachers to sharpen their thinking skills.

Future teachers—as you head out to the classrooms, be ready to cultivate the mind and nurture creative thought.

Blog Reflection - Week of July 6th

From last week's discussions concerning the ideal classroom, I hope to enter my classroom this fall to find a couple of my dreams realized. As an English teacher, I want to be able to supplement the literature in my course with video clips and other forms of media. I would love to have a ceiling projector, which I can access from my computer, in my classroom. Let's face it - not every single student is going to enjoy reading a book as much as I do, but if I can reach the student through a different technological-savvy medium, then I want to do it. For instance, a common strategy in English classrooms is to watch a visual adaptation of a novel or play read in class, but I want to push the envelope further. Perhaps, I can surf the web to find different paintings from a particular time in history that simulates the same historical circumstances and concerns that surround one of my novels or romances. I am confident that I can make what may appear to be a "boring" novel that is confined to a place and time far disconnected seem interesting and present. Technology will aid my pursuits.

This semester I hope to learn more about Podcasting. When I was a high school student, I remember how lost I felt when I returned to a class after missing the previous day's lecture because of an appointment, athletic commitment, or illness. Teachers always had extra copies of homework and assignments, but they were reluctant to provide outlined notes of their lecture. For lecture information, I had to depend upon my peers' notebooks. Deciphering their handwriting was often difficult and attempting to follow their seemingly muddled outlines made it difficult for me to ascertain the overall direction of my teacher's lesson plan. However, if there had been an audio recording of my teacher's lecture, then I could write my own notes.

With Podcasting in my future classroom, I hope to lessen the consequential strain of missing a day of course material. This way, my students would feel less anxiety about missing a day of school due to a private obligation. In order to prevent abuse of the Podcasts, I would still require a written permission slip from a coach or parent before I released the mP3 file to the student, but regardless of the reason, I do not see myself putting the files in the public domain of the Internet. I do not want to create educational "crutches" for my students who do not feel like going to class on any given day, but I think Podcasting with care could be a helpful, proactive teaching technique.

Here's the trial run...

I never thought I would have become a blogger! Alas, here I am sitting in a computer lab at the University setting up my first blog. I am looking forward to learning more about technology and how to use it in the classroom. One day, perhaps, I will integrate blogging into my classroom.