Beginning Blog

I enrolled for this class at the request of a member of our administration in order to get the training to better help the staff members in our building with developing their technology prowess. While the intent is to better help others, it will be a perfect opportunity to also further my own knowledge.

What is most exciting to learn about is how others see students using technology. From my perspective, kids know quite a bit about social media and texting  but beyond that they have few skills that allow them to explore outside of the "click here" mentality. I'm curious how others integrate the reasoning skills with the technical skills so that the kids can figure out what to use and when to use it as well as how to use it.

What I believe I can offer to the discussion is the long view of students and technology. While this might sound odd coming from a computer teacher, my belief is that the technology all too often gets in the way of learning as both teacher and student work toward integrating the technology. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I like to get the students to think before they engage the technology and a lot of the current emphasis seems to be using the technology first. How many times have you watched a student type in a question in a Google search engine rather than thinking about what they are trying to answer? Having dealt with kids both pre and post technology, I might have some unique insight to dovetail the two. I also have some background outside of the classroom so being able to apply practical uses to technology is something that adds to that stew.

What I can learn from the class is the other side of that coin. What do you use to get kids to think? Every teacher has unique approaches with lots of programs and uses for those programs. What are those? How can they be used in other situations? The band director uses a digital metronome app for setting tempo in class, but the same app can be used by the Physical Education teacher to teach the optimum running cadence for burning off calories or for maximum endurance. Can I link those together? Picking the brains of classmates for everything available will greatly widen that pool of knowledge.

So lets go. How can we give and get to make us all better?