Phoebe posed the question: “If 5 yr olds can use a mobile phone… Why cant children use photoshop in art or create i movies instead of role plays?”. Having recently used photoshop for an art assessment at university level i can see how it could be problematic for primary school students. Yes it probably can be done… but how well? and wouldn’t it take a very special class? Using photoshop I lost my entire work and had to start over. The program uses a lot of space and so projects can be very large in size. Also I don’t know that I would use imovie instead of a role play because of the time it would take to set up. It would depend on the focus of the lesson- but a spontaneous role play, that may last only 5 mins, can really push a lesson into action and make it exciting and interesting, whereas making an imovie would take 2 or 3 lessons.
The focus has shifted from how we teach to how they learn. This is the key to finding the appropriate use of technology in classes. I believe that we should use technology that reinforces ways that children currently learn. We don’t need the elaborate… we need the accurate. We need to find, not just what works, but what works well. And sometimes keeping a lesson simple (without using elaborate technology) works well.
This video shows some amazing developments in technology. These are things we can even imagine as being possiable… and yet there they are! This is definately worth a look!!!!!
Technology is great and wonderful and fantastic and amazing and inspiring… when it is working for you. Technology is frustrating and annoying and confusing and stressful… when it works against you. When a computer freezes and you lose everything you had just been working on it can be one of the most stressful things. I see this happening a lot and I know how annoying it can be. So what if this happened to 30 students aged only 8 years old? Chaos.
After reading Alissas post Tormented by tech I began to wonder if technolgy is really worth all the trouble.
Alissa posed the question “If technology is something we are persuing [sic] to catch up with, yet we are the designers of our own creations, why then are we struggling to keep up with it?”
A great question that has left me deep in thought.
I have just watched this video that shows a new school that opened. The school was formed out of a partnership between the education system in Philadelphia and Microsoft. This is a possible ’school of the future’ in which every student has a laptop, the library is online, keycards are used to open lockers, pay for food, and record attendance. To me it all seems a little over the top. There is an idea here- use a LOT of technology and it will work. However I don’t think this is the right direction for education (not to mention bad for students’ eye sight- looking at computer screens 8 hours a day). I like how one teacher in this video says she’d give the school a 4 out of 10 because she prefers the human interaction of ‘normal’ classrooms. Although she does say that the technology is opening doors and makes her job easier. I think I would give it a 3-4 out of 10. It just seems cold.
If you are unable to view this video please click here.
Reading ‘Interactive whiteboards in the classroom’ (Rudd, 2007) has reinforced the idea that there is no clear answer in the IWB (interactive whiteboards) debate. It seems that how successful IWBs can be depends on a number of variables and in short they aren’t for everyone. They can benefit or simplify a lesson or they can complicate a lesson. How beneficial they are has been documented countless times however, for myself- these benefits remain to be seen.
Interactive Whiteboards allow teachers to extend lessons beyond chalk and blackboards. As mentioned in an ‘eschoolnews’ video, interactive whiteboards may improve the pace of a lesson, student motivation, engagement and teacher preparation. More than half of Brittan’s classrooms have interactive whiteboards. Although I agree that ‘students demand interactivity’ and that interactive whiteboards may be a great technology, I believe that great teachers don’t need great technologies. Indeed these technologies can be proven ineffective when misused. Furthermore an over reliance on these technologies may lead teaching down a new path where the majority of teaching occurs on a whiteboard and where teachers are allowed to become lazy. The entire debate regarding the use and usefulness of interactive whiteboards can be summarised by the concept of ‘needs’ and ‘wants’. If teachers were asked if they feel they need an interactive whiteboard to teach their students, they would most likely say ‘no’. However when considering the huge numbers of teachers in England that are using them, if they were asked if they want to teach using interactive whiteboards they may say ‘yes’.
Personally I see interactive whiteboards as all sparkle- a want and not a need. I was fortunate to see one in use when I was last on prac. I was hoping to be convinced that they are amazing, but I wasn’t impressed. I am worried that the classrooms of the future will be overwhelmingly complicated by such technologies. Are we going to lose a hands on approach, where students can learn and be engaged in cornfields? Are traditional methods going to be lost? And will we be dominated by classrooms in which computers teach and teachers monitor?
This shift begins with interactive whiteboards…. are they a need or a want?
I’ve heared a great deal about schools and classes in different countries being able to link to one another via the internet. What this shows is that we live in an age of communication. The world is a much smaller place that it was 50yrs ago. Advances such as high-speed networks allow for students in one contry to communicate with another student in another country half way around the world. The article The Virtual School: An integrated collaborative environment for the classroom examines the benifits and limitations of such collaboration.
”The classroom presents constraints for software design not usually present in home and office environments. Contention for limited computing resources and limited time are issues that computer-based classroom activities typically face (Isenhour, P.L. et al. 2000, p.).
This is a tremendous benifit for education, especially when teaching about different cultures, people and places and harmony between nationalities.
“Blogs, short for “Web logs,” are personal online journals; millions exist, ranging from sophisticated legitimate news sources to tedious (and often abandoned) digital scribble” (Fallon, 2005).
Blogs are opening the world so students in one country can communicate with students in another country on the other side of the world. They can share ideas with a global audience and this allows students to feel that their opinions are important and valued by others.
What amazes me is that the technology exists! These seem like things you’d see in a sci-fi movie set in the future… but they’re here and now. Amazing stuff!
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