21st Century Students, 20th Century Teachers.

We live in a technology rich age, where our students have been introduced to and grown up on chat groups like MySpace, and Facebook, Ipods, play lists, last but not least online multi player video games. They are more comfortable with texting and cell phones than they are with pen and paper. As a matter of fact they are even more adept with the new technology tools that we the teachers are.

I am happy to see that there are websites where teachers can go like wikispaces.com which provides a visual editor that gives you the basics about starting your own wiki space. If teachers are to guide their students into safe practices on the web and continue to enlarge on the new brain wave patterns that the use of technology has opened up, we need to know what they know and more. I am sure that the developers of technology had no idea that what they developed would be the sensation it is or the many ways that it would be used.

It is unfortunate that some of our teachers are too apprehensive of technology, and are insecure about their lack of knowledge when it come to technology. They may be even insecure about allowing their class to be technology driven, as this takes the reins out of their hands, and instead of leading they become followers or simply guides no longer the supreme depository of all knowledge(Richardson, 2009) . I think some teachers are afraid of this.

However when we think of the work place in today's world and how technology is used there, we are placing our students at a disadvantage when we do not do whatever we can to learn and apply technology in our classrooms.

I like what Bob Lenz says in his blog How to go Global in your classroom, " Given the level of technical sophistication of today's student's, why not use technology to extend the classroom and collaborate globally." While professor Barbara Ganley wonders how teachers can expect students to blog if they have no idea how to blog themselves, and experience the impact it has on their thinking, researching and creativity.

Having said all of this what are your plans for the summer? Mine are to do the usual around the house but I am definitely going to research how I can increase the use of technology in my classes and plan some creative lessons for the fall. What about you?

References

Richardson, W.(2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and Other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.

Lenz, Bob (Blog page). http://www.edutopia.org/technology-global-classroom#comment-63216

Technology in the Classroom

I find that with continued increase in technological tools it behoves us as teacher to keep abreast of as much of the new ideas related to our field of expertise as possible. I would want to say all fields but that would lead to brain overload, so let us start off small and concentrate on our field of expertise.

Our students come to us a lot more tech savvy that we are and sometimes we need to learn form them just what to do as we restructure our lessons to include more tech tools.

I believe that technology is best served when we use it to do something completely new and not just to do the same old stuff a different way. What I mean by this is: although the students may enjoy going on the computer it should not just be to do a digitized text book reading or assignment, rather than have them read the paper book. It should be a lot more than that. When used in this way we are only doing the same old thing just differently.

The students can receive a better understanding and become more energized to learn if they have to do a lot more. For me however being new to all the tech ideas I am not so sure what that "more" is or should entail.

I teach Algebra 1 and Geometry to high school students and would love to incorporate more than just the usual power point lesson presentations for my topics. I would love to find out more so I can do more.

Anyone with ideas please let me know. In addition to this I am also doing this post for my Masters assignment. New to blogging and all, thought it would be great to kill two birds with one stone.