week 2

The readings for this week again alleviated some of my fears about teaching in the Net Generation.  I worried that my students would be so locked into technology that they wouldn’t have time for human contact…boy was I wrong!  It looks like the trend is to use technology to enhance and broaden human contact, which is a relief to me as a budding teacher. 

Technology is a readily available, natural part of daily life for a lot of kids.  It’s inevitable that they will use it to do what they do best – socialize!  The challenge raised in the text again and again throughout our reading is for adults to get on board.  Even though there’s a serious deficit between how kids are living and how they’re learning right now, I think it’s going to start closing up more and more rapidly.    

I was excited to see other students’ perspectives on educational blogging in the “Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0” article.  Blogging is a great way to use technology to re-focus education on the student.  A student-centered education in the Net Generation should be social and community oriented because those are traits that students value. 

It’s neat how easily web resources (like photo-sharing, blogging, podcasting, et cetera) translate into teaching tools.  If I were learning how to teach from a textbook and with paper and pencil I would be learning how to teach kids 10 years ago which wouldn’t amount to much of anything.  Learning to use technology in the classroom is a necessary part of learning to teach and I am excited to learn more!  It’s even fun! 

One thing that I kept noticing in the articles and that struck me as a good point is that students are at risk online.  Sending them to a place where they can access anything and be accessed by anyone is akin to sending them out on the street alone during school.  So I think it’s very important that we teach kids about internet safety and educate their parents as well.  Even if they don’t listen we have to teach it.  When we did our in-class Wordle experiment one of the words my partner offered was “naïve.”  It’s so true!  I get so caught up in how smart and adaptive and innovative and just awesome this generation is and I forget that they are kids!!!  So, teaching internet safety is one thing I would like to learn more about.

And Now… Google Docs

I have mixed feelings about using Google Docs for the Technology Lesson Plans Project.  I love that it makes it easy to share my work and I can definitely see how it would have benefits for group projects.  Most of my problems with it were formatting issues.  I created my document first in Microsoft Word which is where I went wrong I think.  For some reason copying and pasting the entire document didn’t work so I did it in pieces.  Then it ended up looking nothing like my original Word document because the tables from the websites were spaced funny.  Next time I will create the document in Google Docs and see how that works.