Blog Post Assignment #3

The video A Vision of Students Today was very interesting and reminded me a lot of the things that I have experienced in my college career so far. It is very true that many people who take their laptops to class with them are not working on school work during class, and I have seen this happening in some of my classes at South. While most people probably simply laugh this off, we have to remember that some of our classmates who are doing this are future educators. One of the other things that really caught my attention in this film was the point that was made about even though some people pay for the class, they never bother to show up for it. What will they do when they are teachers? Just stay at home whenever they don't feel like going to work? It's really something to think about!

If I were to add something to this movie to make it more accurately represent my experiences, I would have it include people texting during class. I know that technology is a great thing in the future of our classrooms, but it can also cause problems for some teachers and students. A great example of this is students texting in class while the teacher is giving a lecture. I have seen this happening many times since I began college, and it can be very distracting for all of the people in the classroom. Like everything, technology will bring its ups and downs into our classrooms.

Mrs. Kelly Hines' post was also very nice. It was refreshing to see a teacher who appreciates technology but also realizes that we as teachers should be able to function without it also. I thought that it was great for her to say that we should continue to do some teaching without the use of all of the new technologies, even though they are available to us. It is so true that technology is useless without a good teacher behind it. No matter how much new technology classrooms might have, our children are still in need of having great teachers.

One thing that I have thought about after reading her post is that parents might not be able to help their children as much as they used to because they might not be familiar with what their child is doing at school if it involves new technology. For example, if a student is given homework on a computer, their parent might not help them as readily as they would if they were doing homework by hand. I worry that the parents might become intimidated by the new technologies used by their children's teachers because they were not ever introduced to them when they were in school. It would be a shame if something like this were to keep a parent from being involved in their child's schoolwork.

I definitely enjoyed exploring Mr. Karl Fisch's blog. I really like the things that he says in many of his blogs and I am becoming a big fan of his through seeing his work through this class. For me, the answer to his question, is it okay to be a technologically illiterate teacher, seems incredibly complicated. The first answer that comes to my mind when hearing this question is of course it is! Why should we have to use technology to teach our students if they can understand what we are teaching and are successful without the use of technology?

After I thought about my initial reaction to this question, I became a little bit puzzled by my own thoughts. While I do not think that it matters how you teach as long as your students understand you, in today's world it might actually not be okay to be a technologically illiterate teacher. There are many things these days that are required of teachers that force them to use technology. For example, all grades are now kept on the computer instead of on paper- this is not an option for teachers as far as I know. Secondly, our job as teachers is to prepare our students for a prosperous future. If a student is going to be successful throughout his or her life, they will almost certainly need to be familiar with technology, so they might be at a disadvantage if they are not introduced to it at a young age in schools and at home.

The changes that I saw happening on the social media count really impressed me. It is so amazing to actually see the numbers of things changing every second! It is obvious that technology truly is taking over our world. This to me means that we as teachers have the responsibilities to learn it and become familiar with it if we want to or not. When I first saw the statistic about how what we are learning now will be outdated in a few years, I could not believe it. Now, after seeing things like this, that fact is becoming more and more real to me. People, the world, and our classrooms are all changing at an alarming rate and we have to commit ourselves to keeping up with all of it!










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