Today, for our Media and Digital Literary class, we were tasked with two activities of our choice. I chose to do an online quiz that claimed to express my opinions or beliefs about the importance of teaching media to students and provide insight on to how I will most likely teach my classroom about this topic. There it is. I am "Alt". I have to admit, at first I was a little bit confused and disappointed with my results. People around me were getting "Spirit Guide", "Motivator", "Techie" and "Teacher 2.0" and I wasn't really sure what I would read about being "Alt" (with a hammer image next to it by the way - you can see my reservations about posting my results). That being said, the Digital Learning Horoscope quiz that I took told me all about my digital media status and I don't hate it! I like the idea of being the kind of teacher that challenges students to think about media in critical and multifaceted ways and encourages students to consider the digital world differently than just a means of connecting with friends and I don't think my results are too far from the truth! I fully plan to explore the avenues and different apparatus' available for learning through whatever means to help the students develop and communicate their understanding. I want my classroom to embrace their curiosities and creativity with respect and encouragement but also with the right amount of supervision, safety, awareness and support. This means that I will have to continue to keep myself knowledgable and up to date, feeding my own curiosities and inquiries about digital learning and media literacy with exploration so I can create this same environment for my classroom! You are what you eat! The second activity that I chose to do for class was to create a Fake-azine! Although the options for title and subtitles were pretty limited, I think I found one that worked with a picture that I had and the idea is still pretty cool for kids to be able to demonstrate some understanding of advertisements or any issue really that they could create a cover for. I would probably explore some more options for this same idea to see if there is a more creative way for them to do that. It could be an interesting project that reflected some cross curricular connections as well if they could have more control of what was written or what they want to say the magazine is about! Education is undoubtably one of the many aspects of life and culture that is directly affected by the rapid progressions of technology. Not only does it affect the ways in which we learn and understand the world around us but in turn, how we teach and evolve as educators.
Integrating technology into the classroom is not something I envisioned when I first decided I wanted to be a teacher. When I went to elementary school we were one of the first schools in the county to have desktops put into our library (or "computer lab" as that area was called). I think there were maybe 8 of them. Our login names were assigned as the first three letters of our first name and the first three letters of our last name - I remember because I was not looking forward to the other seven kids in the lab at the time, realizing that my login was "mad hog" (my stress subsided when my friend Pete Bratt saw the look on my face and assured me his was worse). Anyways, I was young but already inspired to be a teacher in the future at that point so as far as I could tell, that would be the extent of technology in schools. As time went on and dial-up turned into high-speed, desktops turned into laptops and flip-phones turned into touch-screen, my considerations of technology in schools began to evolve but still not at the rate that my understanding of its importance is changing now. Technology offers so many opportunities for knowledge, development and growth of students. As we have learned in our Media Literacy class, it can offer personalized trajectories based on learning style and pace but it can also offer teachers a modern tool for assessment! It is engaging and interactive. It is immediate and unlimited. It allows creativity and communication to flourish. It generates new knowledge and exposes the rest to be used and built on. The possibilities are endless. If used safely and properly it is arguably one of the greatest assets to a classroom and it is no longer restricted to the library or lab; it is everywhere. |
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