Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Monday, January 16, 2017

Blog #1

Teachers are often influenced by their own students to use technology in an attempt to meet the most recent generation in their current state of technological immersion in a manner that best enhances their learning. Meanwhile, students are often influenced by their own accustomation with technology in their daily life to use it in as many settings as possible, including educationally. The two are often directly linked, though, by the intention of enhancing learning. Students all have different learning styles, diverse forms of intelligence, and most importantly varied needs. By implementing technology teachers can target students' specific necessities with targeted educational technology programs.

Reading the ISTE standards for students, something that really cheered me up was in section 3 part b where they specifically state that the information must be used ethically. In recent times, information has not been subject to much ethics, particularly following this political cycle, so the specific emphasis on it gives me hope for an eventual change to our media. Something I believe I will have particular issues with is in the ISTE standards for teachers section 3 part a where they mention applying your knowledge and skills to new technology. Knowing how quickly technology can change and evolve, the concept of keeping on top of that is massively daunting.

A digital native is a person that has grown up surrounded by technology and often can't remember a time without the use of computers while digital immigrants are those that observed technology evolve and had to eventually adapted to utilize it. The difference between the use of technology of the two lies in the purpose of technology. Natives tend to see it as a part of their daily life and often take advantage of its accessibility. Immigrants see technology as a manner of improving their way of life and are often fearful of breaking it and as such seek structure in its use instead of just toying with it as most natives do. This has affected my learning in the fact that whenever immigrant teachers have problems with technology, the lessons tend to grind to a halt at the teachers hesitancy to proceed until a native student helps them. As I stated in the paragraph before, I fear I will be unable to keep up with the rapidly evolving technology and become one of those teachers that needs help from her students to operate the technology necessary to move on with the lesson.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Blog #0

I went to a Science, Technology, and Math Magnet school that had a corresponding Mac desktop or laptop per student in the program. While we did not use them much in certain classes - such as math and history, they were active parts of the science and research classes available. Thus began my career in 20 page papers.... Regardless of this, I'm not a big fan of technology; I don't use social media and the most of my internet activity is for educational purposes. And YouTube, so much YouTube.

Having had technology be an active part of my education, I know how much of an aid it can be in class. However, most of my use of it was exceedingly tedious and uninspiring. I would really like to learn how to incorporate technology into learning in a way that can be equally fun and educational for the students, in order to have them want to learn.

My learning style was Reflective, Intuitive, Verbal, and Global. While I certainly agree with the Verbal and Global scores as they are things I have observed from myself before, I find the Reflective and Intuitive results to be counter-intuitive. Reflective learners tend to think about things before acting upon them while Intuitive learners work fast and innovate, thus putting them together in the same learner doesn't seem very logical. How is one to think about a problem beforehand while innovating in the middle of it?