Week One

The homework for this week was to read, highlight and respond to Claudia Wallis' article How to bring our students out of the 20th century.

This article was both interesting and boring to read. There were a few parts that stood out to me because I was able to identify with them, but for the most part I felt that the article was long and drawn out with very little to say that has not been said a million times before. Everyone knows we need to incorporate technology within our classroom; it is no longer a dichotomous argument over “yes” or “no” but rather a more complicated discussion of how to use technology to supplement instruction without detraction.

Some aspects of the article that I found I connected to included:

1.) “…textbooks are out of date by the time they are printed.”
This is true! I have had a few classes in which the book we used was terribly out of date and my teacher had to make up for this by updating us through other sources such as news articles or newer texts.
2.) “Old-school assignments” have become futile
I have seen this throughout my school career. Nowadays, I feel as if students have become more critical of the information that they are expected to learn and have grounded themselves in stubbornness if the material is not relevant to them.
3.) “…to teach kids to be discerning consumers of information and to research…”
I think this is probably the most important aspect of the entire article. Technology is a great resource, yet many students do not know how to use it while also thinking critically. It is so easy to just go to Google or Wikipedia and find answers that many children are getting lazy. This laziness shines through incomplete understanding of material and the recording of unreliable sources within student work.

Week Two

IN CLASS

This week we looked at a potential teacher resource online at http://www.brainpop.com/

Personally, I found this site irrelevant to my area of study because it is relatively juvenile when considering the age group that I will be working with upon graduation. I feel that this web service is much more suited for elementary rather than secondary students.

POST CLASS

This week our assigned readings included a BBC News article and a scholarly journal piece reflecting over the "digital divide".

The article from BBC News was very short and difficult to completely grasp the importance of the “digital divide” issue due to its inherent lack of depth. In the same respect, the journal article was extremely long and hard to read because of all of its technical verbiage and mathematical renderings. However, I gauged the difficulty of this problem through both these articles. It is obvious that the lack of technology is a major issue for educators. Still, it is a problem that has not been overcome and I almost feel as if it will never be fully dealt with. The articles raised practical questions within me. For example in the BBC article it mentioned a possible yet extremely simplistic answer to the “digital divide”:

“This means that projects like One Laptop Per Child, who want governments to build $100 laptops and give them away to tens of millions of children, need to ensure that their advanced technology is used within a broader context of education and support so that the social infrastructure is in place as well as the technical.”

This is ridiculous! All I can think of is my $600 Dell and its questionable efficiency! Throwing poorly developed technology to financially struggling schools is not going to help them any. So what if they have a computer if it crashes every two months?

In all, technology is constantly changing. Even if we begin to bridge the “digital divide” today, we are almost certain to encounter a new one tomorrow.