As far as using ed tech in the classrooms, I can totally see that it may help me connect with a greater range of today's students, who are very tech-savvy. I hope that I can help students to see technology as an enabler in terms of learning efficiency. I'm not sure there is anything that technology can help me teach that couldn't be taught through other means. However, I would want my students to view technology as helping them gain knowledge more efficiently (I think Monte made a point in class about technology as an efficiency tool in the business world).
I look forward to not only learning how to use the various technologies, but also exploring the pros and cons of integrating the tech into curricula that strive to increase learning of all students.
Bill- you are in good company. I am very new to this world of wiki-ing, blogging, etc. We will learn together :) Hopefully this course will leave us with some pretty awesome tools that we can use in our future classrooms. I'm excited!
ReplyDeleteWhat Jeff and I hope (fingers crossed) is that you'll see the summer as a time to play and explore and think. Consider what might be useful to you and what doesn't feel like a good fit (like you're already hinting at). Pick up a few strategies that you can take into your placement, sure, but mostly revel in the opportunity to explore. Hold our feet to the fire on that one, OK?
ReplyDeleteI wonder how your Flip camera could be a powerful tool for a physics teacher... how you could use it to capture physics in action in daily life, which could be a hook to draw students into an area of study. How could it capture student experiments for later reflection?
Or how could it kick off a new area of study? Here's a little video a friend and I created as an extension for a book:
http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=41213&title=Can_You_Do_the_Magnet_Twirl_
Let's say you show this in the last minute of class. Invite students to think about what happened and why. The next day, you ask them to share their hypotheses and to jumpstart a scientific explanation of polarity.
PS - Jeff pointed me to Dan Meyer's blog: blog.mrmeyer.com - it might have some good ideas for you, even though he's a math teacher.
PPS - Nothing we say is a prescription or a must-do. Just food for thought. :)
We're all somewhat terrified of this great expanse of technology before us. The good news is, as Jeff mentions above, we have a year to play, test, make mistakes and get comfortable. By the way, I'm reading Brave New World now - except I forgot to bring it here to the lake. Damn!
ReplyDelete"I'm not sure there is anything that technology can help me teach that couldn't be taught through other means."
ReplyDeleteI find this an interesting idea... I think there's things around using technology itself that would be very difficult to teach without the technology. The question is whether any knowledge around using technology is making it into "the cannon" of topics we need to teach any time soon. I was reviewing for the MTTC Physics test this weekend and there's a lot in there on kinetics and dynamics and electrical and magnetic fields but nothing on binary logic or semiconductors or coding logic or how physics instrumentation works...
"I'm not sure there is anything that technology can help me teach that couldn't be taught through other means."
ReplyDeleteI just noticed that Emily commented on this as well. On the one hand, of course. The knowledge was there before some of the technology was developed. The question is also one of what should technology help us to teach and that gets into the area of creativity. When we can teach things with a new spin or from a different perspective it helps to keep us engaged and hopefully that engagement will help our students.
Efficiency is a good perspective on the subject. I agree with you that most of what is in the classroom can be taught without (especially in the physics and maths); however there is so much value in technology, especially in looking in the professional world like engineering where background in technology can be the difference between getting a particular job and not
ReplyDeleteIt is possible that anything we have to teach can be done without technology, but even beyond the classroom itself, one of the strongest ways that technology can help us, as teachers, is to help us keep on top of how society is changing. I'm in my twenties now, and still considered part of younger generation that is intimately familiar with the advancement of technology and culture. Evidence suggests, however, that as all of us get older it will get harder and harder to keep up with how society is changing, and the more we're able to do that, the more we'll be able to connect with our students on a personnel level and understand how to make what we're teaching meaning full to them.
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