Chapter III

Focus Question: How can teachers use technology to make decisions about meeting educational standards in their lesson plans?

Technology could be used to to review the educational standards which I'm sure are available online. Furthermore, technology could be used to hold polls online in which students, teachers, and parents could answer and make a majority decision on a question that needs to be decided. Lastly, technology can put teachers in contact with students outside of the classroom, ensuring that students are prepared enough to meet the set educational standards.

Tech Tool: Gliffy
Gliffy is a neat little website that provides web-based programming that teachers can use to create diagrams and graphs. This could be used to create seating charts, graphs, student gradebooks, and other visual media. Gliffy is free to try and also offers a standard and a pro package at 4.95$ a month and 9.95$ a month respectively.

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The chapter starts with a vignette about a teacher who plans her lessons during the time she spends cooking. The story is much better than the previous ones used and is actually readable. The chapter goes on to explain academic content that teachers must teach students. The book explains that although the content that you teach is dictated by the district, the way you choose to teach the content is not. I've always believed in teachers having flexibility when it comes to the way they choose to present the information to students.

Another cool bit in the chapter is a comparison between two different types of testing assessments. Norm-referenced tests compare students with other students and Criterion-referenced tests compare students to standards or objectives. Before this chapter I had no idea these two terms existed. It goes on to talk about electronic grading and the perks of using it. This got me thinking back to my days in high school when my grades were posted online and I could check them whenever I pleased. I'm curious as to why colleges don't employ this method as well. Granted, there are certain teachers who do, but for the most part our grades our a mystery until after the semester ends.

Chapter II

Focus Question: How does technology provide feedback to support learning?

The most obvious answer would be email. With assignments that take place online, the professor can grade and send comments through an email or similar messaging system. Other programs that I’ve had personal experience with include MyLabsPlus which is a math program that grades your online assignments and provides your scores to you online. If you miss a question, you are notified instantly and there’s even a button that provides you helpful hints to solve the problem.

Tech Tool: Web Resources For Creativity (Poetry 180)

All the tech tools in this chapter are web resources, so I picked one of the few that caught my eye. Poetry 180: A Poem a day for American High Schools is an interactive web site designed for students to be read a poem on each of the 180 days of the school year. At the homepage, I was greeted by an introduction by Billy Collins – I liked where this was going. You can follow a link to the list of all 180 poems and take your pick or simply go in order. As a future educator, I have always planned to expose my students to poetry, and this resource makes it readily and easily available to do so.

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On page 36 they mention student-centered teaching approaches which I’ve always strongly advocated. Learning should be student driven – teachers are merely the tour guide. One page over I noticed the phrase metacognitive thinking. Metacognitive means “thinking about thinking,” and this book applies it to the classroom in which it is defined as students reflecting on their own learning. I found this concept fascinating; not only can we teach them, but we can give them the tools to self-evaluate their own learning.

A few pages over I stumbled on the term visual literacy which I was unfamiliar with. It means “the study of visualization in all its aspects of communication and education.” This translates to the real world as the ability to decipher and understand things like pictures, graphs, illustrations, and diagrams. I wondered how, if ever, you could measure visual literacy, seeing as other types of literacy have standardized testing(s).

Chapter I

Focus question: How do technologies create new opportunities for teaching and learning?

Simple: it can eliminate the human element almost entirely. While this carries a negative connotation, such as the fact that we'll stray from the interpersonalness of the classroom, there is also a bright side to this coin. With lectures and discussions streaming real-time on a webcast students who are unable to make it to class can now have access to the classroom via any computer in their house or wherever they may be.

However, with information so widely-available and streaming all day everyday on the internet I can

teachers being displaced or even replaced by computer screens in the future. With all the information you could ever want at the tip of your finger and virtual learning tools where is the need for an actual flesh-and-blood? Couldn't we just code a bot--a virtual teacher that appears right on the screen--to teach every subject? And this bot could have simultaneous access to every yottabyte of information ever known about the subject. It happened in the factories, why couldn't it happen in the classrooms?

Tech Tool: Ultraportable Laptop Computers

It's a short abstract about the benefits of laptops to students and educators. While unarguably a helpful tool, I don't believe they're a necessity. There was a time when teachers carried no short of an entire library in their briefcase. Those days are long gone. Nowadays, most students and teachers have laptops open in class. A pen and paper seem like relics nowadays. Personally, it's not for me. I own a laptop for personal use but don't use it at school and probably never will. For me, the time-honored staples like pen and paper will always have their place.

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The introductory chapter was wholly underwhelming. I knew things were off to a bad start right from the get-go. The chapter begins with an uninteresting anecdote about a group of college students working on an assignment for their technology education course. The story centre's around Donasha, Max, and Ava and their poignant discussion about where they fall on the technological spectrum. The story is painfully hackneyed and presents us clichéd stereotypes that we can attach to and suck our opinion out of like some sort of plecostomos from hell. The writing is even worse: simple, dim, unimaginative, and comma-happy. It's almost as if they hired Ernest Hemingway's half-witted, out-of-work cousin to spit this out under duress. Donasha is a bleeding-heart technocentric, a do-gooder and the obvious epitome of the author's themselves. Note that she is given two whole paragraphs for her partisan views while poor Max, the character closest to myself, gets a measly three sentences.

Thankfully, after the abysmal story the chapter reads more or less like a standard college course textbook. On page 8 they present a bell curve of Rogers Innovation Adoption Care and ask you to classify yourself in regard to your interest in using technology in teaching. I chose "Quick to Follow Proven Success," and while I could easily see myself as an innovator in most regards, I’m a luddite at heart.

It wasn't all bad: Page 11 contained an interesting graph on the top five reasons teenagers’ dropout. Surprisingly, laziness was not listed.

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