Lessons Learned

I enjoyed watching and reading the videos and articles that were provided to us for this assignment. Each of the articles and videos made me really think and reflect on the technology that we currently have and how it has changed over the years.

The article called "The New WWW" made me reflect upon how technology has changed over the last ten years. The article was written in December 2005 and it discussed the many changes that were coming. It also discussed the fact that we live in an age that wants instant gratification and we get that with the technology that is available to us in this day. The article spoke of whether we should embrace this new technology and use it to enhance our future classrooms or if we should just keep the technology out of the classroom and keep things how they have been forever. I feel that it is very important to take advantage of the great technological advances that are being made. They can enhance the level of learning that we are able to offer our students. Just like we have learned in this technology class as well as the class we had before this one, we have learned about the great things that technology can do to make our classroom better and the creativity that we are offering our students to have. I love the idea of blogging in the class, the idea of videoconferencing with students from other cities or even countries and the idea of having students create their own digital stories or movies for reports. The great thing is that these things are not only ideas anymore! They are realities! We can use this technology for so much good!

The video called "Did you know?" hit home! It had so much information in the six minutes that it lasted that I can't even recall everything but I do remember that it compared England to China and India. We are in the same boat as England. We need to make sure that we are up to par and are preparing our students with the technological information and skills that they need to be successful in this competitive world that we live in. I liked the part of the video that said we are preparing our students for technology that hasn't even been invented yet. I was reminded how important it is that I continue to educate myself and keep up on the newest technology. By doing this assignment I now know several different classes and workshops that I can attend to keep up on this information.

The other article that I really liked was titled "Study: Teens See Disconnect Between Personal and School Writing". I really worry about how our youth today because I feel that many of them are losing the ability to communicate with others. So many of them are online and texting so much where everything is abbreviated such as lol and say things like U2 rather than writing you too. I feel like we need to allow the students to be creative and the article stated that many of the students feel that they are not able to be creative in their school writing but they can be creative when they are writing on facebook, in texts or other non-school writing. We CAN allow the students to be creative! We have been learning in this class how to do that by teaching them to blog their thoughts as a journal, to create their own websites and to create digital stories are just some examples. There are endless ways for our youth to be creative now. Let's encourage creativity and show the youth of today that we are ready for them!