First off, I want to point out that my classroom drawing was horrendous. There's a reason that I'm not an art teacher. I never quite progressed beyond the ability to draw stick figures.
The technology I included in my classroom was fairly basic. All I really wanted was a TV, DVD player, computer, and a projection system. While I think it would be wonderful to have a classroom set of laptops for students to use, I don't think this is a realistic expectation in a public school. I think that the projection system is especially important because it will allow me to make use of many of the technological skills that we will learn in EDUC 504. I'm excited to learn more about the Poll Anywhere system and how to incorporate blogs and Twitter into the classroom. I've studiously avoided Twitter in the past because I thought it was silly, but I recently discovered that it's an interesting way of keeping up on breaking news.
I think that the ability to use these technologies is even more important for teachers nowadays because the students we will be teaching are so technologically advanced. Much is made of the negative effects that the Internet, text messaging, and blogging have on students in the classroom. While I agree that all of these can have a detrimental effect on students as they provide misleading information or serve as a distraction preventing them from focusing on their studies, I also think that they can be harnessed to change students' concepts of learning. By presenting information to them in their "language" (ie. through Twitter or a blog), it is my hope that I will be able to more fully engage students in the classroom.
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Kris, one of the problems that I like to see as an opportunity is the matter of not being able to automatically trust that material we find on the web is accurate. Of course, you and I know that we would be foolish if we automatically trusted that we were getting the accurate or complete story from any source, whether it's called a "textbook" or what have you. This question raises what could be a very interesting opportunity to explore the important intellectual and human skill of being a healthy skeptic. A healthy skeptic...what does that mean? What habits of mind has someone inculcated into their way of engaging with the world, such that people would consider her (admiringly, even) as a healthy skeptic.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, if you ever wind up engaging these kinds of issues with your students I hope that you'll write about them.