Weeks of Knowledge

Over the past couple of weeks we have covered a tremendous amount of material. Some of the highlights for me were:

Group Work
My group consists of five women who are all extremely talented. The fact that we work well together and combine our weaknesses and strengths makes this class so much more enjoyable. The first week we tackled a task none of us had ever done before. We Incorporated narration into our ppt presentation. It was challenging and exciting. The amount of collaboration that was involved in that project would have made a collaboration teacher proud. We each narrated our own slides and then merged the whole project together. Viewing the final presentation was so rewarding.

We had a great discussion on LoTi; what it is, and how we all rated. We discussed what we thought about it in the classrooms we have been in. Here is my reflection of our discussion:

The Loti presentation was very informative and explained the concept of this assessment in a user friendly way. It explains the importance of and why technology should be used in the classroom.
I am not working in a classroom yet, and I really don’t have a lot of experience other than my observation, fieldwork, and my own personal experiences with my children.
As far as my own personal rating, I think I would be at a level 3. I use a lot of technology in my every day life and in my current position. I think this experience puts me in a good position. I believe that when I am in the classroom I will be able to implement my technological skills with hopes to continue to improve upon them to achieve level 6.
After our group discussion, I think we all agree that many classrooms have technology in them, like Smart Boards, but many teachers do not use them. I have noticed that “new” teachers, young and old use the Smart Board, but “veteran” teachers seem to shy away from them. In my opinion, it seems that the more experience teacher, teachers who have taught for many years, are “comfortable” with the way they teach and would rather not incorporate technology.
I hope that over the years and through natural attrition, the implementation of technology improves in the classroom, I know it will be in mine.

We are moving on to our next group project "Constructivism and the 5E's so more on that later...

Online Class Discussion

This week we had our first online class meeting. It was so nice to meet with the other's in our class. The feedback and discussions were interesting and insightful. Lot's of people responded to the Learning to Change/Changing to Learn video clip. I have already posted a reflection on that, I agree it gets you thinking about what we need to do in our schools today.

We discussed LoTi as a class and most of of all agree that many teachers today do not use technology in their classrooms. The services are there. An example that most agreed on was we observe many teachers use the smartboard as a glorified whiteboard rather than using it the way it should be used.

As a class we also discussed the article Digital Native, Digital Immigrants. An amazing statistic in the article that really caught my attention was that "Today's average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). "Digital Native Digital Immigrants, Marc Prensky. I think I am a digital native only because I have worked in a position where technology is all around me, but for most of the class felt like they were digital immigrants. View the article and see which one you are.....