What Type of Technology Should I Use?

One of the tricky things I am finding at the moment is that there seems to be too many types of technology that I can use in my classroom. I am lucky enough to work at a school that promotes risk taking in using technology in the classroom, as well as the resources to support this. Last weekend I spent 3-4 hours looking at the different options available, and how I would use these options.

However, that was what was what made it so confusing. I want to use technology in the classroom, however I want to use it effectively. I want it to be a tool to enhance both student learning and my teaching. I want to use it to develop rich and rewarding tasks and activities. What I don't want it to be is an add-on. A GLAT (gosh, look at that) use of technology with no real outcome at the end. And this is why I did need to spend so much time looking at the use of technology in my teaching.

I eventually decided to work a little bit with trial and error, as well as limit the applications to one at a time. I designed a blog for all my classes, as this allows me to provide an overview of each lesson, add links and it also allows students to add comments. Each of my classes will work to create a class wiki and this will become our main resource for reference and revision. (The school does not use textbooks). And finally, I will definitely be using applications such as Keynote, iMovie, ComicLife and mapping applications (Google Earth, Google Maps and possibly other software) in each of my lessons. My classroom blog can be accessed by clicking the following link - Bec's Classes.














If any of this becomes confusing or is not helping my students learning I will be the first to know. As stated by David Nettelbeck in Computers, Thinking and Learning, "the best ideas get nowhere unless they can be applied, and our most critical audience is always our students".

Something we must remember as teachers is that change is happening all the time, and we must attempt to keep up. This may require a little bit of effort (for me, most of last weekend), however the rewards will be in my teaching. The You Tube below is called 'Shift Happens' and provides an excellent explanation for us all on the exponential nature of change or 'shift' that is currently occurring. This in itself should be a clear indication that any use of technology, however small but effective, is better than nothing.



I wonder if things were this tricky when technology went from chalk and a slate board to pencil and paper....

Image taken from rutty on flickr.

How Google Is Making Us Smarter...

I found this article 'How Google is Making Us Smarter' from the DISCOVER Magazine on Metafilter (a great site by the way), and had a read. It is interesting as in the first two paragraphs it tackles the debate that technology (mobile phones, internet etc) is making us 'more stoopid'. I have always struggled with this argument as I believe our students are much more street smart when it comes to finding and using relevant information, as well as utilising technology and particularly the internet for their needs. In particular, the article looks at the 'extended mind', and the argument that our environment is often an extension of our mind. We need both to be successful, and the internet, and indeed technology is part of our environment.

Rather than arguing that too much technology in the classroom is 'dumbing down' our students, maybe we should be more worried about the school environment as an extension of student minds. Maybe we should also consider that we need to prepare students to utilise this ideal more and more in the future.

To end this post, something quite poignant at the end of the article....

Socrates worried that writing would make people forgetful and unwise. Sure enough, writing did rob us of some gifts, such as the ability to recite epic poems like The Iliad from memory. But it also created a much larger pool of knowledge from which people could draw, a pool that has continued to expand.

Imagine the world without writing... That is definitely something for us to all think about....