Teaching with Technology Final Reflection

EDLD 5364 Teaching with Technology Teaching with Technology had provided me with an array of options for incorporating technology in my lessons through its readings, lecture slides, and videos, and activities. I can authentically integrate technology in my lessons. The overall theme for me was learning about adding technology activities into my lessons. I also was able to personally relate to constructivism and connectivism, I incorporate a little of both theories as a teacher. “George Siemens speaks of how a learner has the ability to create connections between various sources of information.” (Week one slides--3) It is how you connect your learning internally and externally. I do believe that is our experiences that enable us to connect prior learning to new learning. I could also to relate to Vygotski when he stated that, “the concept that as a learner gains new information from instruction, through reading, hearing, or collaborating about the new information, the learner adds to his or her personal baseline knowledge and creates new knowledge.” (Week one slides—3) Students come to the classroom with an array of prior knowledge and experiences; this develops learning for students. When students come into the classroom without many real world experiences, this can hinder their learning because they don’t have the prior knowledge to pull from. “Every learner has experiences that influence his or her understanding of the world.” (SEDL, 1999) Over the past thirteen years I have taught in two areas of town, which are completely opposites, for the most part: one is very low socio-economic and the other school is middle class. The biggest eye opener for me has been what a big role life experiences play in our educational world. My students from the poorer side of town no matter what they do, will never have the life experience many of the students from the middle class. This is where we as teachers have to as best we can level out the playing field and bring those experiences to our students. We can begin by incorporating technology activities and bringing the outside world in to the class through technology. The internet, smart boards, videos, e books, blogs, UDL lessons and other multimedia, can provide our students with meaningful experiences. As educators we need to provide meaningful experiences for our students so that they don’t group up learning meaning isolated facts. Student’s “know a lot of facts but can’t solve problems” (Big Thinkers: James Paul Gee on grading with games). I know when I went to school all we spent time on was trying to make sure we had random facts memorized: dates, computation, and other concepts that were to be taught in our given grade levels. Now, I realize that old school teaching was just rote memorization but if we want our students to evolve and be able to be successful and productive adults we must teach them how to actually solve problems and work collaboratively, as stated in this video. As educators, we need to teach our students how to solve problems and think critically, in other words apply what has been learned, just memorizing random facts in isolation is no longer the way for our students to attain success. References: Week One slides----slide 3 Edutopia.org (nd). Big thinkers: James Paul Gee on grading with games. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation-james-gee-video Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, (1999). Learning as a personal event: A brief introduction to constructivism. Retrieved from http://www.sedl.org/pubs/tec26/intro2c.html