Final Reflection

I definitely think that integrating technology in education is very important now. There are so many different things I was taught I could do in this class. For example I never would have thought to make a class website that my students could check daily/weekly for assignments and updates! I also think it is a good idea to have students get involved in making websites of their own!

I didn’t know much about technologies in the classroom when I came in but now after this semester I know a lot more about them. I think this will really help my future students in my classroom because I will be more up to date and modern. I also want to add that this was by far my favorite class of this semester because we not only learned really interesting and fun things, but we also became really close as a class which was a ton of fun.

SmartBoard Reflection

From the article “Are Interactive White Boards Dead” I learned how expensive all the equipment can be ranging from a minimum of $4,000 all the way up to $6,000. Not to mention all of the heavy equipment that needs to be installed in the classroom before you can even use it! The most useful features I saw mentioned in the article were the highlighting tool, annotating, and being able to print what is on the board. For most teachers and presenters I would say it’s quite pricey when your students or audience could just take the notes themselves. This article also suggests using iPads or touch screen TVs in the classroom. Technology is just so advanced now that it is almost impossible to come by something cheap.

In the second article I read, “The Art and Science of Teaching: Teaching with Interactive Whiteboards” I learned of three other features that increased student achievement. The most interactive one would be the “hand held voting device.” I actually remember using this feature in my high school. We were all assigned a certain calculator that we got everyday and they were all programmed to the SmartBoard so when my teacher asked us questions we could all work the problems out and cast our votes. It was always pretty cool and we enjoyed that so it helped to get everyone working and involved.

Copyright Reflection

In high school most of my teachers went about talking about copyright issues by scaring us! It definitely worked and still works today. Not many people will knowingly plagiarize something and pass it off as their own if the threat of getting kicked out of school is looming over their heads. Sure there are still people who do that but that’s few and far between. I would like to talk to my students about it by informing them about the rules/laws, how to not do it, and how to check if they plagiarized something. Knowledge is key in an issue like this

Our stop animation video took a lot of time to do and was very frustrating with all of our technical difficulties so I would be kind of annoyed if someone used our video and tried to pass it off as their own. I don’t know if my group should have maybe included something to give credit to the music we found off the internet? We didn’t but we obviously didn’t create that song that played in the background.

Reflection Five

The first trend, using mobile devices in the classroom, just doesn’t really seem like the best idea to me. In high school we were never allowed to have our cell phones which seemed like the worst at the time, but I know I would have just been texting and not paying attention if we were allowed to have them out (because I was texting and not paying attention already, just secretly!). I did like the “Scavenger” App we used in class but I just feel like from personal experience high school students weren’t given as much freedom to go all around the school on their own.

Tablet based learning sounds like a great idea. I am from a small town in south Georgia however, and I know that my school district wouldn’t have been able to afford all that!  It’s seems like a very great idea but pretty far fetched to believe each teacher would have access to their own personal iPad!

I actually just had a substitute come teach my class on game based learning. He is getting his PhD on this idea. I feel like this would work really well for younger students who might enjoy silly games more, but for college students the idea just wasn’t really connecting with us and we all thought it was a little pointless because we all knew we wouldn’t go home and create an optional game to help ourselves study. College students have a lot more going on most of the time but younger students could definitely benefit from game based learning.

The challenge I could relate to the most was the institutional barriers. I remember in high school they would always block so many websites. It only affected the students really when we had free time and we were trying to play games, but it would affect the teachers sometimes as well. YouTube has some great educational videos but the site was blocked at my school so when my teachers tried to show us things on there, they couldn’t access the sites. To avoid this problem I would download the video onto some sort of hard drive and bring it in to show my students.

I would like to try the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) method, just to see if it would work with my students.  I feel like everyone can navigate their own electronics better than other people’s. If you have ever picked up your friend’s iPhone, it usually takes a minute to find all of the apps and buttons because they are arranged differently. Same with computers! I just think as a teacher I would have to monitor my students very closely to make sure they were staying on task.

Reflection Six

I think Facebook groups for the parents is a great idea but could get a little tricky because people post personal things on Facebook that they might just intend for their friends and family to see. It would be a great, simple way to inform parents of events or have them bring items to a class party. I also think sharing photos via Shutterfly would be great! It would be very simple to make a separate classroom account so you only post pictures of the students in your classroom and you can still have your own personal account to share other photos.

I would definitely like to use the Google calendars because that seems like a very efficient way to keep parents up to date on the many things that would be going on in the classroom that month. I could use color coding to differentiate between events like homework, projects, or parties so the parents could see what the child is responsible for and what they are responsible for. A class blog would be great too because I love how easy it is to post things. The blog seems to be working out great for our classroom so I hope it would work out just as well in other classrooms.

Reflection Four

I definitely see myself as a digital native. The internet and email, etc. have all been around for as long as I can remember. At first smart phones seemed like a thing of the future but now they are part of my everyday life and I couldn’t imagine trying to go without my phone. Whenever new digital technology comes out, it is very easy for me to figure out how to work it because I’ve been using different pieces of technology my whole life and I am used to them, unlike digital natives who might not even know how to turn an iPhone on (my dad!!).

My future students will probably be exposed and used to much higher technology so it will be very important for me to keep up with the new types of technologies being used in schools to keep up with them. There will always be some divide between different generations but since I will be working with young children, they might not be using the highest technologies since they will be so young. I’ve definitely seen a divide in the generations especially with my parents. I am used to doing everything really fast and navigating my phone, the internet, or TV very quickly, but they are SO SLOW it seems like! Basically everyone my age can go through their phones and search, call, look up anything they want at lightning speed. My future students will probably expect me to be able to navigate through all of the technology in my classroom very quickly too but that might not be the case so I will definitely have to practice a lot when using new technologies.

Reflection Three

The idea behind Technological Pedagogical Learning Content Knowledge, which is that teachers must have extensive knowledge in both the content or subject area they are teaching and actually how to teach. The first part seems very obvious. You won’t be a very good calculus teacher if you can hardly do long division. The pedagogical knowledge is what stuck out to me, especially since it is not even concerned with how the students are doing. In most of my education classes it has always been about what works best for the students, are the students following along, etc. It never focuses on what the teacher actually knows about how to teach. 

Something important to me as an educator were the many different types of knowledge. When I think of knowledge I usually just think “Oh, I know that.” I rarely ever  ask myself how or through what medium do I know this information? I definitely agree with the reading that it is most beneficial to have many different types of knowledge. There is not just one type of knowledge that stands out as the most important, which sort of surprised me.

The big take home message I got from the Meaningful Learning with Technology chapter was that you shouldn’t use technology just as a tool to get your work done, but you should work with the technology and collaborate with it to expand your own ideas. I especially liked the section on “How Technologies Foster Learning” because it gave a variety of ways it can be used that I had never thought of.