Class started out with a nice introduction by the instructors and rest of the students telling us why they are teachers. Many of the stories I have heard from my fellow cohorts was very inspiring. I love teaching and working with adolescents. I just hope I can inspire and serve my students as to the best of my abilities. I still remember my fourth grade teacher who inspired me to enter science. It was he, with his lessons on biology that awoken in me a natural tendency for investigation. To think of all of the students he inspired through out his 30+ years of teaching, motivates me to become a better teacher.
After the intros,we got into what we want to learn from the course, issues we have with, and what we remember about technology use in schools. Going back to a familiar theme, I hope to learn how to use technology to enhance my lessons. The fact remains we live in a world where children are surrounded by technology. Many students have facebook accounts, gmail accounts, visit youtube regularly, and actually consider wikipedia a valid reference source. We can either fight technology by banning smart phones and cell phones in the class and placing strict web filters on computers, or we can just accept the world we live in and use these tools for good.
As John Dewey stated in his Pedagogic Creed, "I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." I believe John Dewey would embrace technology in order to educate students how to live in the technologically advanced world around them. Educators according to Dewey should be cognizant of their students' innate abilities and environment. If technology such as the social networking, wikipedia, blogs, iPhones, etc teachers should use these tools to develop higher cognitive skills and level of knowledge from concepts, procedural, and metacognition. This goal is even more apparent in the current era of the common core standards.
Here is my pick for article of the week, courtesy of eSchool News.
Teaching the physics of Angry Birds
I agree with you about the importance of incorporating technology since it has such an increasing presence in our world and society. Your Angry Birds example is fantastic! I'm not sure, though, that teachers should use all of the technology available (such as social networking sites, blogs). I'm not sure how to pick which ones to use and not use but I don't think they all need to be turned into educational tools.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what you mean by your reference to the common core. Could you expand on the connection you see there?
What I meant by common core standards is our we as teachers going to ask students to use tech just for simple recall/remember or are we are going to expect more of our students to use tech to enhance their learning. From my experiences, students just hop on to the computer to grab something from wikipedia without using it think more deeply about what they studying.
ReplyDeleteI hope that I, too, can inspire my students. I think high school teachers play a big role in determining career paths of students. Just as your science teacher inspired you to go into biology, mine inspired me to go into chemistry. Hopefully we'll both be able to inspire our students when we become teachers!
ReplyDeleteI want to point out that not only are we gonna be working with students, but we are also learning to work with our fellow teachers, so it is nice to have a class where although we are focused on technology, we are from all the discipline to learn how each one looks at technology and what resources are available to make the subject matter we teach more accessible.
ReplyDeleteI too am looking forward to learning ways to utilize technology in the classroom to enhance learning. We should add classes to high school that teach about cool topics such as making applications for iPads. There are a lot of layers to learn about to get new products out there. That would be a practical use of technology.
ReplyDeleteIt would be great if we come up with ideas on how to be inclusive with all students with limited technology resources. That seems to be an area of interest from our class.