Monday, October 11, 2004

Thoughts on Technology in my field

The technologies that I feel will be most valuable to my English classroom are some of the most common. I intend to have my students do a lot of writing. Micrsoft Word or some other text editor will be used by every student at least once a week. As they write essays and short stories and newspaper articles, their most valuable technology resource will be these text editor programs. I remember talking to my sister that went to school in the age of the typewriter and hearing her sad stories about having to retype again and again her papers for the smallest errors. Computers have drastically improved the rate at which people can revise and print papers.

Also, my classes will be doing quite a bit of research about literature and its themes. The best research resource in the world today is the internet. I imagine that by the time I am teaching, most students will have a good grasp of how to use the internet and search things out.

In this class, I have thought that this Blogger would be a great resource for my classes. The blogs are a great way of communicating wtih other classmates. With the literature we will be reading and the global issues we will be touching upon, having a group of students blogging together online will increase student's ability to share and get information with others.

I love English becasue of the very open-ended nature of the class. I hope to be able to use a variety of technologies in teaching my classes.

Friday, October 08, 2004

Technology Video 2

The second movie we watched was "What makes writers write?" This movie showed the use of technology only by the teachers as they presented information to the class. I really liked the lesson plan as a whole that the teachers used, even though there was minimal use of technology. No computer-dependant work was involved. I believe the internet was used to research the inventions, but this could have been done through other means. The technology allowed the teachers to invoke emotion and induce thought about a piece of literature. This was a good contrast to see between a classroom project that was almost completely dependant on technology (in the first video) and this video which hardly used any technology. In both videos, the students were assigned to work in groups, but in the second video, the students seemed to interact and discuss concpts more than the students making the videos together. Both uses of technology were effective, however different. An interesting juxtaposition I found in the study of Fareinheit 451 (which critisizes technology) and the use of technology in the teaching about the book... interesting.

When we met on Thursday morning, we didn't have enough time to finish both videos together, so our thoughts on the second video are posted on each of our respective blogs and we'll each read the other's.

Thursday, October 07, 2004

Technology Videos evaluation

The first video we watched was "Students find their voices through Multimedia." All of us were very impressed at the way this teacher used and integrated technology into the classroom. The technology did not obscure the learning. Also, these were group projects, but there was not one member of the group that had a dominant role. The work was easily divided and completed and each person had their given assignments. The technology gave them more of a personal investment in what they were learning and producing. The projects were each published and posted on the internet. Their posting on the internet was a great tool in helping the students connect their projects and learning to cyberspace.