Digital Blog B Chapter 2

Chapter 2 Blog post

First, Teaching is a career that matters to everyone— students, families, employers, and society as a whole. Filled with powerful complexities, endless questions, and wonderful rewards, it requires constant learning. As a teacher, you are expected to:

• ·         Convey essential academic material to students in ways they will understand, remember, and use. Doing so produces a growing sense of personal and professional accomplishment.
• ·          Teach and reach all students, each of whom has unique individual needs and interests, in large- and small- group settings. Doing so builds your identity as a creative educator who can create success from challenges.
• ·         Balance students’ outside- of- school influences (social class, family income, race, gender, language, and individual exceptionalities) with inside- the- classroom dynamics (academic content, teaching methods, assessment practices, interpersonal dynamics, classroom management activities, and daily routines) to maintain and sustain academic learning. Doing so establishes a vision of success for positive change in the lives of students, families, and communities.

Because of years of experience as students, beginning ­educators often teach as they were taught. They utilize whole-group instruction with desks arranged in rows, while students mostly listen, take notes, complete worksheets, and receive grades reflecting test scores— all time- established educational routines. These practices often fail to engage at least half of the students who experience more active learning environments in other parts of their lives. Suggesting that you can create more lively and inspiring teaching situations is much easier than making this a day- to- day reality in a classroom with students of many backgrounds who possess different levels of interest in the curriculum and divergent learning styles. Technology changes teaching and learning in enriching and productive ways by:

• Differentiating instruction to offer students diverse learning experiences
•  Motivating disengaged individuals
•  Creating group and cooperative learning situations
•  Allowing access to academic information from multiple sources
•  Letting students visit places and observe processes that cannot be seen without electronic systems. This list of creative possibilities is constantly expanding, making technology an essential tool for either a beginning teacher or an experienced educator.

I also think that it’s very important to want to be a teacher in order to make teaching career matter, which will make it more enjoyable and less stressful. Yes, I know it’s impossible to not stress out, but at least when I get stressed out I remind myself that I chose the teaching career because I love to teach and that helps me realize the positive side of my career. In regards of teachers teaching the way they learned years ago, should be trained to teach as education and technology evolve. I have worked with teachers that got their degree twenty to thirty years ago and they teach the same way. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have credibility in what and how they teach but they should be opened to learning new ways to enhance education in classrooms, especially with all the technology available on this present day. I wonder if it has anything to do with learning new things that obviously these teachers didn’t learn years ago when they graduated? Or is it that they just are so used to what they learned and don’t want to learn or implement any new techniques?

Second, almost everyone has heard Apple’s now iconic marketing phrase, There’s an app for that!” App is short for application, meaning a software program that runs on a smartphone or tablet computer. Initially associated with iPhones and iPads, apps are now available for all smartphone and tablet brands. There are hundreds of thousands of apps out there, and the number is increasing steadily as people demand more and more ways to use mobile devices for entertainment, information, and learning. There were 25 billion app downloads for the iPad between April 2010 and March 2012; downloads in Google’s Android market reached 10 billion in December 2011 ( Quitney & Rainie, 2012a).

Apps are also educational technologies that offer exciting ways to engage students and inform teachers. Apps fit well with classroom or field- based learning activities in which teachers and students can be readily connected to online information sources (EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, 2010 May). When questions arise in class or in outside- of- school conversation, answers are available by accessing an app for that topic. There are apps for just about every academic subject, including:

Science: The Elements and 3D Sun provide visually engaging, highly interactive explorations of science topics. Molecules, a free app, gives three- dimensional views of molecules that can also zoom in and out and be moved across the screen using two- finger pinch and swipe gestures. Frog Dissection lets students interactively explore anatomy.

English/ Language Arts: Poetry, an app from the Poetry Foundation, lets a user hit a spin button to access poems English/ Language Arts: Poetry, an app from the Poetry Foundation, lets a user hit a spin button to access poems.

English/ Language Arts: Poetry, an app from the Poetry Foundation, lets a user hit a spin button to access poems written about multiple topics from happiness and joy to sadness and grief. Story Patch and Rory’s Story Cubes invite storytelling by students

History/ Social Studies: Early Jamestown is a multimedia early American history textbook. Back in Time presents a timeline of the history of the Earth with amazing ­graphics and interesting information. The FDR Years has thousands of photographs from the collection of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library.

Math: Math board offers interactive explorations of the hundreds board. Tanzen features engaging mathematical puzzles for students to solve. Quick Graph provides ways to visually display information from polls, surveys, and experiments.

General Information: How Stuff Works has information about thousands of everyday life topics. Choose a topic, read an article, take a quiz, watch a video, and follow web links to learn more.

There is a lot of more information on what and how apps work, but I have to say that it’s amazing how technology arises and how apple created these apps to make technology more convenient when having to look up something online, not only is it easier to just open up the app, oppose to looking up the website needed and logging in at all times, but having apps that help teachers teach and engage students, that’s wonderful!“how safe are these apps?"

using the apple in education app site

Third, historically teachers and schools have used technology sparingly, rather than as an essential component of teaching. In 2002, a federal government study concluded that education was the “least technology- intensive” part of the U. S. economic system (U. S. Department of Commerce, 2002). In 2011, a former head of the Gates Foundation concurred: “Education remains one of the few sectors that information and communication technologies have not transformed” (quoted in Bailey, Henry, McBride, & Puckett, 2011, p. 6).

Technology use in school by teachers varies greatly (see Figure 2.6). Most teachers use computers for email, word processing, recordkeeping, and data management functions. Project Tomorrow (2012b) found that teachers are also using technology for other professional tasks, such as webinars (28%), multimedia presentations (54%), online learning communities ( 38%), uploading videos and photos ( 65%), reading blogs and wikis ( 34%), updating social networks ( 45%), and posting on Twitter ( 8%).

However, a much smaller number of teachers regularly use technology in classroom teaching. According to a national study by Walden University, only one teacher in five frequently uses technology in class to support student learning. “Frequent users” were defined as teachers who spent more than 31% of class time using technology. Some 60% of teachers were “sporadic” or “infrequent” users, spending 20% or less of total class time supporting student learning with technology ( Grunwald Associates LLC, 2010, p. 6).

 You will find similar patterns of technology use by teachers in the schools where you are working. Many teachers may see computers as valuable additions to their teaching, but they do not regularly collect and interpret data using handheld devices, create webpages or wikis displaying ­individual or group student writing, ask students to analyze resources found on the Internet, or otherwise build technology into lessons. There will be teachers who hardly ever use computer technologies while teaching, and there will be others who connect computers to learning on a daily basis.

At first I felt like technology was taking over young children and they wouldn’t know how to use a pencil, read from a textbook, decorate folders, etc, etc, and felt that teachers should use technology to teach in middle and high school, of course it’s important to for children to learn about technology, but not make it a priority in education. On second thought yesterday I had to go and observe a classroom as part of my homework for another class, I chose a kindergarten classroom at Parkside Elementary, the teacher was alone with 16 children, she was able to have them engaged and they gladly participated with structure and routine, and to my surprise, she used a projector most of the time I was there, they discussed math equations and she would look up videos on youtube that related to what she was teaching. She did the same thing with phonics and literacy. I was amazed with how engaged the children were; I would have to say that was my first experience of watching a teacher teach elementary students through technology, aside from a preschool room where children have computer time during free choice. Of course it would all have to be for what’s best for our children in education. 

teaching kids to use Blogs and Photoshop

In conclusion, I think that technology is playing a major role in education, whether it’s from the teachers end or the students. It’s well known that technology makes learning enjoyable and interesting. I would say that observing that teacher that was teaching with you tube trough the projector, and when going to the technology class, the teacher emailed them a worksheet that they had a to design a rocket ship out of shapes and they learned it by one simple example that was taught to them.

Resources:

 Textbook - Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.