Technology Integration Plan

Click here to access my Technology Integration Plan for a unit on Newton’s Laws of Motion.

The Access portion of the Integration Plan primarily focuses on how new topics will be delivered by lecture. The first strategy, direct teaching, can be supplemented with a PowerPoint presentation to present bullet points, highlight key terms, and provide visual aids for certain concepts, both in diagrams and videos. Internet access will most likely be necessary to utilize video resources. The classroom discussion and problem solving time can take advantage of a Smart Board coupled with online demos and virtual labs. This can allow volunteer students to manipulate simulations in front of their classmates to help me illustrate concepts and demonstrate certain phenomena and relationships. Students will also be shown how to access other online simulations and will be given worksheets to help them explore several of them on their own.

All of these strategies and tools for the Access portion are to support NJCCCS science standards for refining concept knowledge with new evidence(5.1.12.C.1), and to begin to introduce the concepts behind Newton’s second law, F = m A (5.2.12.E.4). The addition of the technological components supports NETS-S standards 1.C, using models and systems, and 6.B, finding and using applications in an effective and productive manner.

The Analyze segment delves more deeply into how I will have my students take the information from lecture and begin to deepen their understanding of the concepts through problem-solving. Like the lecture, much of the in-class problem-solving time will be guided by me with questions and diagrams displayed on the SmartBoard. Students will need their calculators to help them quickly convert mass into weight and find cosine and sine values of the components of angled force vectors. For homework, the students will still have their calculators, but can also clarify instructions or receive the actual assignments and clarifications through an online student portal. Finally, within the context of a laboratory scenario, students can make use of available probe sensor devices to get more accurate and straightforward measurements in motion and freefall labs.

The strategies are to support the science standards 5.1.12.B.2 and 5.2.12.E.3 - the scientific practice of using mathematical tools and technology and new uses and interpretations of Newton’s first law, motion only changes with the presence of a force. The technology integration allows fulfillment of NETS-S 1.A and 3.D, where students apply existing knowledge to generate new work or techniques, and process data and report results.

I will have several methods for assessment. For these lessons, I will be grading homework and keeping track of results with simple in-class formative assessments. I can utilize Microsoft Excel to keep track of the results of the simpler assessments, which can quickly aid me in identifying gaps in knowledge. This can apply to certain groups or perhaps represent a larger misconception by the majority of the class. Students can also assess their own work and in certain cases apply for a chance to revise their work, identifying what the misconception was that led them to incorrect answers or explanations. The online student portal will allow them to keep track of the grades their work is earning them and help motivate them to buy in to their own success. This reinforces both the science standard 5.1.12.C.2 and NETS-S 4.D standard which encourage the revision of work and prior thought patterns, and the pursuit of alternate solutions. Science standard 5.1.12.D.2, which calls for excellence in reading and writing to express the student’s scientific thinking patterns, is satisfied through this process as well. More examples of assessment will be discussed in the Production portion at the end.

Like many science classes, the physics classroom is a great opportunity to encourage collaboration and communication. Labs in particular are a great way to develop the skills for teamwork, as they will always be a group endeavor. Beyond using tools like Microsoft Word and Excel to neatly write up results, answer questions and organize data, students can use modern online tools to efficiently manage the project. Google docs in particular makes it incredibly simple for all students to instantly access all the resources and collaborate in its assembly. Social media and other means of electronic communication, like text messaging or chat, can also assist the students in communicating about their objectives and allow for opportunities for everyone to participate from the comfort of their own homes. The collaborative skills that are developed through this align with Science Standard 5.1.12.D.1 and NETS-S 5.B.

Finally, the lessons will also incorporate opportunities for students to produce work to express the depth of their understanding of the relationships we’ve learned about. This can be demonstrated via written work in answering open ended and free-response items, verbal responses to questions and also through the solving of some of the higher-order problems. Opportunities like this will be given through informal discussion during class time, through homework questions, and, of course, quizzes and exams. Small projects and presentations can also be used to demonstrate a concept, such as a student or group of students doing a demo. With all of these, Microsoft Office applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint can  be used as a medium to organize, support and/or deliver proper demonstration of the student’s thought processes. A variety of internet resources can also be used by the student to clarify his or her understanding of the subject or to research when gaps in knowledge need to be filled. Proper and mature usage of these resources fulfills NETS-S standard 3.B, which says that students are expected to be able to locate, organize, evaluate, synthesize and ethically use information from a variety of sources and media. Science standard 5.1.12.A.2 also sets the expectation that students should be able to interpret and manipulate evidence-based models to build and critique their arguments and explanations. 

Math, Science, History, unraveling the mystery that all started with...

Whenever I tell people that I study physics, the Big Bang Theory almost always comes up at some point. Three of the main characters are physicists and fill every possible geek/nerd stereotype one could imagine – they embed science analogies in their conversations, have regular trips to the comic book store and attend comic-con, and are among the most socially oblivious creatures that roam the world.

I wonder how familiar my students might be with the show – obviously some of the content is more mature, but nothing the average high schooler wouldn’t be watching. If I deemed it appropriate for the class, perhaps using occasional clips before leading into certain lessons would be really effective! Even at the beginning of the year, I could use this clip from season 3 to transition into my personal introduction to the course, reassuring that I won’t be teaching them anything like Sheldon would:

          Sheldon teaching physics

Although a great deal of their discussions revolve around highly advanced topics in quantum physics, a lot of the references they make as asides can be understood by someone who’s taken a high school-level physics course. For my students, this may make them feel as if they’re in on an inside joke. I might even want to assign extra credit projects where they pick references from the Big Bang Theory or other shows and make a presentation to their classmates, pretending that they were explaining the joke to a bunch of friends who didn’t get it. 

Caution with implementation

I have a lot of concerns about certain technology being a good investment, especially trendy (read: pricey) devices like iPads. I get just as excited as everyone else about having a fully equipped modern classroom with a SmartBoard and enough computers, but I think this stems from the greedy nature that comes along with growing up in an entitled consumerist society.

Most of us want to ensure that we have all the ‘tech necessities’ in our lives – a smartphone, high speed wireless internet at home, a big enough hi-def enough tv, the devices that make our HDTV prove that it’s HD, etcetera, etcetera. I think that we as teachers have that same mentality about our classroom – that we, and of COURSE our students, need and deserve the very best. Otherwise, how are we to educate in the very best manner? (Sarcasm intended)

When we put more thought into it, it becomes obvious that we do not need to set our classrooms up with one top of the line fully loaded 17” MacBook Pro and iPad 3 for each student. Nor can we really afford to go to the opposite extreme and have our students trying to do 21^st century work on computers running Windows ’95, or even worse, fail to have our students learn to be tech savvy in the first place. So the real question is, “how do we find the best balance when it comes to equipping our schools with modern enough technology on a sensible budget?” To answer this, we’ll need to have proper research and evaluations behind how well different technologies support learning. 

As Larry Cuban points out, the research approach needs a lot of improvement and schools have to be willing to trust the data:

          New Technology in Schools : Does it Work?

The article is a quick read, but be sure to hit both parts of it. I’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions – if better research showed that a lot of classroom technologies have little to no impact on learning, how would that hit you?

Some thoughts on video gaming

A few years ago I was a manager for several different GameStop stores. When I decided to make a big career shift and move into teaching, one regret I had was that the vast majority of the experience and skills that I had built up to be a successful and marketable retail store manager wouldn’t really carry over. But upon reflecting on my experiences in different stores, it hit me that I have a fairly good insight into areas that almost all American students have an enormous interest in – not just video games, but music and movies as well.

For video games, it’s important to acknowledge that they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. There is a very large gender gap when gauging students’ interest in electronic gaming, although more and more girls have found gaming approachable and accessible in the past five or ten years. Systems like the Wii and Nintendo DS and the growing popularity of simple mobile games have brought in tons of demographics that would never have been interested in gaming in the 16-bit days.

What I’ve found most fascinating about the gaps in interest in video gaming is that there’s virtually no difference in interest across different socioeconomic groups. Attainability of the most modern gaming machines and the newest software may be different, but you’ll find no shortage of students in Newark who love playing their Playstation 2 systems as much as more affluent suburban students who own every up-to-date console available. A shared interest like this seems very rare to me, it doesn’t seem very likely that children with such starkly different backgrounds and cultures would universally love video games. So if a vast majority of our students are so into gaming, why is it so hard to come up with ways to use this interest to engage our students’ learning?

It could be that educational software is simply unwelcome on these platforms. Consoles like Leapster are a rare case of a perfectly effective educational video game experience, but only because all the hardware and software is exclusively focused on that purpose. Furthermore, the target audience is for a fairly young age, and as it carries no other entertainment purposes, other home and handheld consoles become more desirable as the child grows older.

When the DS first came out, Nintendo began exploring ways to incorporate educational software and came out with some great titles like Brain Age, Personal Trainer: Math, and Learn Science. Brain Age in particular was a huge commercial success and got a lot of parents to reconsider the value of allowing their children to spend time playing video games. To a certain extent, though, the presence and success of the games may have been based around naive purchases. In my experience, the vast majority of the copies of educational software we sold were purchased as gifts by the parents or relatives but rarely or never put to good use. Lots of children immediately traded the software in to buy more engaging games, and the general impression I got was that the only benefit of having educational software was that Nintendo made their products more marketable by claiming they had better intentions for the kids using their systems.

Despite the inherent difficulty in merging the worlds of electronic entertainment and education, I feel that there’s something important to our students’ ever-growing interest in video gaming. I’m not sure how I would go about tying in this interest my students may have into my classroom – I’m certain that engaging the students as a class with games would be ineffective, but in certain one-on-one scenarios perhaps I can use a particular student’s interest in games to motivate learning. In my case, this may be finding out what kind of game they’re into and having them analyze how certain physics properties were programmed into the game’s engines or perhaps having them find moments in the game where the physics don’t actually make sense.

In the end, regardless of how any of us may feel about gaming, we have to face facts - we're all going to have students who love them. How would you go about engaging a student who has no interest in your class but loves playing Halo? 

Setting the bar for accountability

          Social Media in the Physics Classroom

Above is a link to Stephanie Chasteen's 'Social Media in the Physics Classroom'. The vast majority of her insights and observations apply to all content areas, so it's definitely worth a look even if you're not teaching science!
In several of my prior posts I've pointed out my concerns about the distractions and disruptions many technologies bring into the classroom. Chasteen quickly addresses many of the same concerns I've had, but points out that a teacher who constantly discourages the usage of technology ("lids down time) does the student a disservice. She does a great job pointing out effective ways to use various social media tools to shape your students' learning, but the biggest thing I took home from this was the advice to have accountability - having a wiki-based contract and encouraging buy-in from the students. If I can find a way to make this more effective, I'll not only be free to use a huge amount of online resources with the fill trust of the kids, but I'll also be shaping them into responsible technology users at a very early age.

Double Slit Experiment simplified

The concept of the double slit interference pattern was something that baffled me at several points in both my high school and collegiate physics courses. I remember doing labs on this and having the feeling that the concept WOULD be something important to understand but I just never connected the dots and was able to visualize the phenomena and what went into it.
Truth be told, I think this is an example of a whole slew of concepts that a lot of physics professors 'get' themselves but have a hard time passing on the visualization and importance on to their students. In high school, something like this may be glossed over - which makes the introduction almost pointless. The very premise of the wave-particle duality is one of the most fascinating aspects you can address when describing electromagnetic waves, and yet it's all too easy to either go over your students' heads or underestimate their ability to grasp the concept. In all honesty, how many of you scratched your heads and/or yawned whenever the terms 'double slit', 'interference pattern' and 'wave-particle duality' came up? That's what I thought.
Well, thanks to our friend Dr. Quantum, even those of you who hated physics and struggled with it can get a powerful visual for not only how the experiment works, but WHY it's so dang crucial to both the study of electromagnetic waves and quantum physics:

          Dr. Quantum - Double Slit Experiment

Although I won't need to go into the quantum aspect of this video too much in my class, it's going to be immensely helpful when I talk about the light wave version. The animation alone with the highlighted interference on the waves simplified and clarified a concept that I used to be rather puzzled about. This gets added to the list of go-to videos along with Bill Nye!

Science jam, key of Curium

Early on in my observations, I noticed some of the 7^th and 8^th grade science teachers using a very strange method in their classes. Every once in awhile a big announcement would come up – that in a few days, lyric sheets would be passed out, and the students would all get to sing a song about the science topic they were covering.

Yep... songs… 

...singalong songs… 

...about science...

...to the melody of ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’... 

...couldn't make it up if I tried.

And you know what? The kids absolutely ate it right up. The very announcement sent them into a frenzy, and the students eagerly anticipated the upcoming lesson that contained this delightful treat. They would bristle with energy and excitement, and sing out songs about the rock cycle and elements at the top of their lungs. Self-conscious as tweenagers are, not a single one of them wanted to miss the chance to join in on these songs.

So in the oddest implementation of technology yet, I plan on tinkering around in GarageBand next semester during my student teaching with my 8^th graders. Writing up some MIDI-based tracks should be a piece of cake, and if my students are into rap, I’m sure I can drop some beats for them. I highly doubt I’ll get a chance to do this with high school students later on, but there is NO way I’m going to pass up a chance to utilize music in my science class, especially seeing how insanely enthusiastic all the middle school students at this school were about the idea. 

P.S. The symbol for the element Curium is Cm ... C minor... terrible science gag of the day, complete!

Never enough restrictions?

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/53910819-79/ipad-apple-ipads-students.html.csp

For all the effort and great intentions that go into new technologies to be used in the classroom, it’s a shame that there’s no way to overcome students’ natural abilities to uncover EVERY distraction they can find. Apparently even the mighty Apple can’t quite counter these tendencies, as the article above reveals. As simple as they make it to disable and restrict all dangerous or unproductive apps and websites, students quickly found out that using iMessage can’t be blocked in any way!

Such a small loophole now means that usage of already purchased iPads will have to be severely restricted and monitored, and in many cases would prevent districts from purchasing iPads. The risk for cheating or even just unnecessary chit-chat outweighs the possible benefits of implementing all the educational tools an iPad can bring to the table. Apple clearly wants to be marketable and have the iPad be the tablet of choice for the classroom, so it probably won’t be long before a proper set of tools are released to ensure that this won’t be a problem any longer.

The real shame in all of this is that lower and lower attention spans are the source of both the need of new technology and the risk of implementation. The reason that devices like laptops and iPads hold so much potential is because students overuse them recreationally and are, quite frankly, bored when engaging technology isn’t present. Then, given the tiniest opportunity to exploit distracting and entertaining non-educational aspects of the technology, students unravel the devices and ruin what could have been the engaging classroom experience they needed.

I personally think there should be more emphasis on encouraging maturity in the utilization of technology at an early age. In the market, devices seem to generate the most appeal (even for adults) in the potential they hold for keeping us far, far away from boredom , and it’s no surprise that all of us are now programmed to be distracted and entertained at every moment of the day. When we have a class full of children or teenagers who are wired this way, it's not fair for us to try to master the balance of giving them enough tech to stay engaged and restricting the access they have to avoid distraction.

What can we do as educators to overcome this and hold our students to higher standards of behavior and maturity?

Interactivity #5

I interviewed a 6^th to 8^th grade ESL teacher working in the North Arlington public schools in Bergen County, New Jersey.  Early on, it was very clear that NETS hadn’t been unpacked in detail to her.  The term ‘NETS’ actually didn’t initially ring any bells, but she did recognize it once shown the actual standards lists.  Since the interview was conducted over her school’s spring break, she was limited to the paperwork she had at home with her, and could not find anything in her files that referenced NETS specifically, nor could she recall any specific training on these standards.  However, upon reading the list she was able to give me a lot of insight into what her district has been doing to meet the standards.

Their superintendent is very pro-technology, and their classrooms are very generously equipped.  Given her small class size, her room is one of the few which doesn’t have a SmartBoard. She has received several laptops and an iPad along with workshop training and constant software upgrades to fully utilize all her technological resources.  Their grading and lesson planning systems are all online and completely paperless. Workshop days with free choices of topics always include abundant opportunities to master technology utilization – recent mandatory workshops covered topics like cyber safety and cyber bullying, supporting the Digital Citizenship standards.

She found the North Arlington 3 year technology plan (2010-2013), which does not specifically reference NETS. It does have ICT (Information and Communication Technology) Literacy standards, which are expected to be incorporated and explained in the lesson plans. The layout for this is similar to how we are assembling our lesson plan spreadsheet for Interactivities 4 and 5 – in addition to the strategies aligned with the standards, usage of technology must be noted and explained.

Again, it’s difficult to tell whether or not the school’s current policies are adopting and implementing the NETS specifically or if they’re just under a larger umbrella of technology integration. My interviewee was confident that even though she wasn’t aware of these specific standards, she was certain that her superintendent would get all required standards met well before deadlines.

Judging from my classmates’ posts about their own interviews, I’m not too surprised that it was so difficult to figure out why NETS seemed to be missing from the school’s technology plan. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to see how readily she was able to explain the other implementations that have become their day to day standard.

In my future as a teacher, I’ll have to make sure I keep myself up to date with the state expectations independently of my district. While keeping on top of the school’s plans to meet standards is an administrative responsibility, knowing the standards and being ahead of the game myself will save me a lot of work down the road. It may even potentially give me an opportunity to shine when I can show my colleagues how I’ve gone about integrating the new standards. 

Link to updated lesson plan analysis with NETS-S and NETS-T standards.

Damaging Distractions

My cooperating teacher runs two faster-paced enriched courses for his 8th graders, and for their class we're giving them a group project where each team of 4-5 students has to teach their classmates about a topic they haven't gone into detail on yet. Students picked topics like electrical circuits, sound, light, and electromagnetism, and have to teach their peers the key points, show them a demonstration, and give them a quick assessment on what they should have learned.
Many of the students wanted to see their phenomena in action before just reading the chapters cold, and rather than wasting tons of time retrieving equipment and setting up labs that might not work well, I decided to encourage them to use some online lab simulations. The teacher thought this was a great idea as well, and we showed them a site that had some great programs that would quickly take the place of the more time consuming and labor intensive labs, and really give them great insight into many of the fundamental ideas behind their topics that they could start with.
This was going great, until the students devolved from learners into browsers. Within moments of showing them the sites they could get the labs from, most students had opened up multiple tabs in their browsers and were pulling up songs on YouTube and a multitude of other focus-draining sites on the side. It seems that the firewall on the network does block out obviously noneducational sites like Facebook and Twitter, but there is just no shortage of procrastination enablers on the web, and our 8th graders wasted no time in figuring out which ones they could get away with pulling up.
It's hard to assign blame to them, as we as adults are (generally) not much better. By now, most of us have made the connection that when it's crunch time, we can only truly get work done by being disciplined about limiting what windows we keep open, but it's undeniable that using internet resources to be productive comes coupled with the inherent temptation to fool yourself into opening up the forty things you 'need' to keep checking on.
For our students who haven't gotten to this point, how do we illustrate the danger of letting distractions seep in? In some cases we can try to catch them and reprimand them, but if they're really expected to be able to take advantage of these awesome tools, we need to be developing their mindsets so that they become aware of their tendencies. At what point would they be mature enough to take ownership of something like that? Is specific education on how to wisely approach browsing something that needs to be implemented?

Online Assessment

Yesterday at my fieldwork location, I got a chance to chat with one of the school’s most tech savvy teachers. He met up with my cooperating teacher to give him an overview on how to set up online assessments through a new Google program that he was advocating. The short quiz he made to display the features had rather ridiculous questions and answers, such as:

The speed of light in a vaccum is:

a.       3.0 x 10^8 m/s

b.      9.8 m/s/s

c.       I honestly don’t care.

After submitting the quiz (with a lot of intentional wrong answers) he then logged into the teacher’s side of the program. It quickly created a data table aligning the names of all the ‘students’ (Tebow, Darth Vader, Trogdor, etc.) with overall scores and their personal answers to  each question. Clearly he had already presented this to several other colleagues to provide a good amount of data entries. You could also see the amount of time taken to complete the assessment and the time it was taken at.

Then we got to the real beauty of the program – a separate organizational structure reveals the deeper details of what the students don’t get. It highlights statistics and patterns about which problems gave the students the most trouble and really brings out the details of what the students’ misconceptions really are and where a review or clarification is badly needed.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to use something like this in my classroom once in awhile. I can see it being particularly effective being executed a week or two prior to a large unit test so that students can self-evaluate and I can manage my teaching strategies most effectively to make sure their content knowledge is as sharp as I can make it. Sadly, the big limitation on the program is student access – the school obviously has permission to use the program, but there’s a fair amount of red tape involved with granting access to students. Obviously this is a necessity given how dangerous the internet can be for a child, but hopefully in the future programs like these will gain a stronger foothold and students can easily gain permission to partake in these types of assessments.

Interactivity #4

Link to Analysis

In the past few weeks in my classroom observations, I latched onto a ton of great strategies that I saw teachers use, and saw a great opportunity to apply some of them in a mini-unit on magnetism. Typically, units on electromagnetism prove challenging to most students, particularly in visualization, as magnetic and electric fields are completely invisible. I observed teachers using great online demos on SmartBoards in front of their classes, and found a few that really clarify some tricky topics like A/C current and electromagnetic induction to apply here.

In aligning the standards to the strategies and applied technologies, the first road block was the lack of 12^th grade standards for electromagnetism. Along with other common high school physics topics like optics, there’s a lot missing from the NJCCS in our field. The electricity and magnetism standards only went up to 6^th grade, with no deeper knowledge expected afterwards. Thus, a good portion of my focus went into seeing that the 12^th grade standards for science practices were incorporated into the lesson delivery. To accomplish this, I also incorporated some extra technology resources to support a more appropriate lecture, encourage effective social collaboration, and prepare students to independently create a lab project later on in the year. This would involve them returning to sites with online interactive demonstrations and designing a tangible experiment to accompany a selected demo.

The original technology list from the lesson plan only incorporated the lab equipment, magnets and simple electrical circuitry, and a few online resources for clarification. This was essential to the learning, but left room for improvement. My additions of the virtual demos and opportunities for group work deepened learning opportunities even further.

Response for Interactivity #3

For the inventory that we assembled, I was really impressed with how many different facets are touched upon by the technologies we used, from planning to delivery to activities. Equipment like SmartBoards and computers instinctively come to mind as some of the strongest and most effective examples of classroom technology, but I underestimated how important supportive technologies would be. After completing the spreadsheet, it really struck me that I’d be relying much more on resources to design lessons and communicate with my students than I initially anticipated – particularly in collecting advice from other teachers’ blogs and pulling data in to reshape approaches in delivering my instruction.

We all brought forth some great in-class hands on activities and demos. Some technologies made getting more traditional equipment like microscopes into the classroom easier and more efficient. Some technologies enhanced or completely replaced the way that hands-on labs can be tackled, particularly the PasCo gear like dataloggers and motion capture devices, which empower students to collect more accurate data in a less tedious manner. Other resources like a SmartBoard paired with some of the great online demo libraries we found will really go a long way towards illustrating concepts more effectively during lecture and capture the students’ attention. A lot of these technologies I’m already observing being put to great use in the classroom, and I’m looking forward to asking my teachers what sort of resources they pull from when lesson planning.

Interactivity #2

What we now would call ‘simple’ tools like scales, hotplates, glassware and microscopes were the most influential technological advances for the science classroom. Although such tools weren’t exactly groundbreaking at the time they were introduced, they represented a big leap forward in students' personal ownership of their understanding of science. They not only would receive great hands-on tools to explore concepts with, they'd be individually responsible for knowing how to use and take care of their equipment. The same way that utilizing presentation technology (smartboards, videos, etc.) is empowering for teachers, providing lab equipment to the student alongside support and training was empowering for the students' in self motivated learning.

A theme that kept constantly popping up in both of the readings was the idea that technology has become a medium for corporate meddling. In the late 80’s and early 90’s, donations would be made to get televisions or computers into schools with the only string attached being advertising. From a protectionist viewpoint, Channel One’s advertisements were perceived as inappropriate and almost akin to propaganda, and it’s no surprise that the biggest voices in the educational world like the NEA, national PTA, AFT and others moved to pull it out of the classroom as soon as possible.

One of the biggest reasons I chose to become a Physics teacher is because I believe that learning to see things through a scientific lens is empowering, even to students who think they hate the content. Those who come from more creative fields, like art and literature, often criticize the scientific mind for being too cold or only seeing things one way. But in reality, a mature scientific mind constantly questions the world – we aren’t here to tell students that planets move in the way that they do and that atoms have certain properties, we’re here to cultivate a desire to know how the universe works.
To me, advertisements and propoganda in a student’s life are among the most toxic things that can ruin his or her ability to think creatively and scientifically. It’s worrisome enough that students’ private lives are filled with activities that are saturated with advertisements (television, internet), but to think that that corporations actually tried (and at times succeeded) to get their feet in the door of our schools and program our kids to be consumers… it’s sickening. My job to get a student to think and learn at very high orders of complexity, to get them to a point where they can challenge and modify their own observations and view of the universe, and this all becomes pointless when the student has grown up accustomed to being told what others want him or her to believe. We obviously can't fully control what they're exposed to outside of school that may shift their mindsets, but we need to keep doing our best to make sure they aren't exposed to that influence within the school and perhaps educate them early on how to identify and evaluate propoganda and misinformation that they may be exposed to online and on TV.

                               

Nothing ruins learning the truth like being exposed to an exciting lie.

Interactivity #1

Coming from a teacher’s perspective, Olivia’s relationship to technology strikes me as both a huge opportunity and a huge danger to her learning. With less convenient access to technology, one would expect that Olivia might be lagging behind some of her peers in her ability to handle computers or cell phones with the same level of dexterity, but she clearly demonstrates how quickly and confidently she can type on both. However, the speed and comfort she has doesn’t necessarily translate to aiding her when she’s working on a project – one huge thing I noticed is that in spite of her speed typing, her MySpace page is absolutely LITTERED with spelling mistakes. Now, this isn’t to say that this suggests that she’d have lousy grammar when applying herself – she most likely picks this habit up from all of her friends, and the misspellings are intentional. However, it’s important as a teacher to realize that a lot of her free time (several hours a day usually) is spent in this world that discourages proper academic practices in writing, and it may be crucial to ensure that her written work doesn’t reflect these habits.

Another thing that strikes me as a red flag is something one of the teachers in this video mentioned, that a lot of these kids’ first instinct is to go to their MySpace or Facebook page. Olivia is in the same boat – she has limited access to technology, but because of how she spends her time on the computer she might have a hard time hopping online to begin researching for a project. Again, this is where a teacher or parent would have to keep an eye out to make sure her online study habits are solid in spite of the distractive nature of most of these sites. Even in my own academic career I’ve had to be very cautious with keeping Facebook open in a side tab while trying to search for information and finish projects.

In my life, there were three main areas of technological communication advances that were very significant. First was instant (later text) messaging, which allowed me to multitask conversations alongside other tasks I could do, like homework or even other types of browsing. Second was the growth of online gaming, where I could take a hobby that was already fun to me and compete or cooperate with friends or meet new ones. Third was the evolution of portable internet devices. Even though smartphones are only recently taking off, having the wealth of knowledge of all the internet streamlined and with you everywhere you go has already become an incredibly difficult thing to live without. The last one in particular has really had an impact on my learning in recent years, with being able to serve as a quick information resource or even just for organizing my plans and work.

The students in this video really use the technology in the same way that I do, which I think it something that will be important in my classroom in the future. I may not want to waste huge amounts of class time with a discussion on how great Xbox live is, but I believe that the lack of a gap between students and myself technologically will be a great asset. Being a bit older and having made mistakes with the same technology that they’re using, I will hopefully get plenty of opportunities to steer them away from the more harmful habits that can set them back. I feel that the tendency to overestimate one’s ability to multitask and to be drawn into the more ‘fun’ (ahem, distracting) sites that completely ruin productivity. Quite frankly, it took me way too long in my own life to draw a very distinct line between my online social life and the work I had to get done, and I hope that I can impart the wisdom I’ve eventually gained upon my future students.