Readings 4/4/11
This week while reading the Kymes article on “Compression Strategies” it really made me question what type of teacher I am going to be. I say this because the article focuses on online environments. I know that using new technology and the Internet is a new and great source for learners I also feel old school in its teachings. Using technology is increasing and I see it used in my classroom everyday. Currently my students are using glogster (online resource) to do their book reports. Doing this has been a great idea but it has also come with its problems. First my teacher had never used it before so it was hard for her to answer the student’s questions. Luckily she had the technology assistant and me in the room to assist. Other problems she ran into was making sure the students did not use www.youtube.com because of the possible bad things they could come across (they were however allowed to use www.schooltube.com). This leads to the article talking about having students know what a good source is. This I agree with being very important because there are a lot of sources on the Internet that are not reliable. The problem I see comes with time. I already see in my classroom how little time she has to do the things she needs to get done in all subject areas. Is teaching them what is a good and bad source another things that teachers have to get done. With the growing in technology there is the growing in what has to be taught. That is what raised my question “Am I going to be the older teacher who still does everything the old school ways?”
My post was actually very similar to yours in that I fear I will become the teacher who cannot keep up with technology and will still be using powerpoint or prezi instead of some new fancy invention. I also mentioned how the article talks about setting online information up differently so it is easier for students to scan and skim to find the targeted information, however, that includes a new set up which brings the important information to the very beginning of the text and calls for straightforward headings. I know this was not the way I was taught to present information or write stories, so my question is, will this abundance of technology completely change the way that the future teachers have been taught?
ReplyDeleteI know you are in a 5th grade classroom so I would be interested to see technology being used in your room. I am in a kindergarten classroom and I havn't seen technology used all year. Even in my previous placements, I may have seen an Elmo used once or twice but that is it. I want to be able to use technology so my students can benefit from all it has to offer. It makes me nervous to implement technology like I would want to since I havn't seen it done before. You said your teacher had some trouble with glogster at first, do you think using technology is beneficial enough for the students that it outweighs times like that when it may take valuable class time to work out glitches?
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