Reflections after Post # 11

When I attended the i-pod class from the district, we ran into several glitches that were time-consuming. Updating to the new i-tune version took forever. Then some computers had additional issues. Downloading the apps wasn't quick either. Like any type of technology, time and version upgrades were also factors. In the SBISD apps list, I found information that was already not valid, like a youtube that had already been removed by the user. It was not easy (not obvious to me), to replace my old i-tunes icon on the computer for the new one. But I got through it although it took time (again, my two left feet). The classroom is not immune to these unforseen down times.

Favorite tools: I liked Wordle and digital story. I think I would use both for students to work on habitats. Wordle to create a list of vocabulary words and a digital story to show their understanding of a specific habitat including flora, fauna and the climactic conditions that make the combination possible.


Transfomed thinking about the learning that will take place in your classroom:
Technology is an instrument for apps that we use in our daily lives for work or for personal use. Issues like battery life, internet access, viruses, response time, compatibility between versions upgrades and prior versions, slow response time, time out, error conditions, they are all glitches that we have to live with. It can easily frustrate the newbie. It is the cost of technology. Yes, we will have times when it won't be available for one reason or another, but there will be many more times when things will run smoothly and it will save us time through the use of a different learning modality.



For instance, when someone thinks understanding of an app has set in, a revised version without the look and feel of the old one appears. The floppy disks, the diskettes, the large, bulky computers are all history. Digital has replaced analog. Digital has replaced traditional film negatives. And we continue to evolve and adapt as we have done over the centuries. This is an important message for our students. Exposing them to the i-pod/i-pad/Apple and the Dell laptops is no longer a nice to do, but a must do.



Unexpected outcomes from this program:
While working on the individual items, I kept being remined of the article "The Most Daring Education Reform of All" (Diana Senechal, Spring 2010 issue - American Educator) which covered in depth and found it very enlightening. The author warns against the danger of throwing out the old to replace it with the new, "While some of these ideas, taken in moderation, have the potential to enhance a curriculum, reformers have often carried them to extremes, forsaking intellectual study in the name of 'real life'."

As teachers, it is our responsibility to develop many skills like the ones in 11Tools while continuing to develop problem solving, task analysis, evaluating and sythesizing skills. Over the decades, there have been several movements to transform education. We are currently going through the 21st century movement driven in great part by the advancement in technology. But it is up to the teachers in the classrooms to assess the need for technology as opposed to paper/pencil/brain work in a given subject/assignment.

In some cases, the technology is an integral part, and in others, it may be a distractor. It is not an easy task to discern sometimes what to choose. When all is said and done, it boils down to being able to create a in an informed manner. It will take time, but I think it can and needs to be done. Just like applications we learned a year, two years, a decade ago and are now obsolete, the same will be experienced by todays' students. The important skill here is getting them used to the ever changing environment (technology and otherwise) and creating a thinking population that can take what they learned and extrapolate from it into the new. The key is not quantity, but quality and depth of teaching. Technology is here to stay and will either help or hinder any learning, depending on how it is used.