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.