#4 Students, Teachers, and Technology

Twitter has been a new experience for me in this course. I did not have a Twitter account before starting this class and have therefore had to learn a bit about how to use it and what to post.  I have found that most people on the site report about current events, personal interests, recipes, and personal updates. 

I have never been very comfortable posting information about myself on the Internet although I have a Facebook Account that I regularly check. I do not however post very often—I prefer to read what other people have to say. 

On Twitter, I have decided to follow NASA and APA—which for those who are not aware is the American psychological association.  It has been very interesting being able to see what they post—I am bit of a nerd about these things and have thoroughly enjoyed the updates that they provide. 

My posts tend to involve more personal interests and other things that I enjoy.  I think that in my future career Twitter will help me stay more connected with current events in my field and people who may be a part of my network.

            The digital divide can affect students in school by allowing those who are more connected to be more successful in circumstances where Technology is required for learning and success.  It can also impact students through their parents who are likely just as separated as their kids and may not be able to function as easily in an environment where parent involvement requires skill with technology.

Causes of the digital divide may be related to the different areas where students come from—rural, suburban, urban. The access to technology may be different in different areas. Another factor is likely income of the family. A student from a lower income family may find technology to be less essential than other expenses.

In the classroom, this may create the problem of inadvertently giving some students an unfair advantage. Students who are better equipped to work with technology will not have much of a struggle to understand and be successful in a classroom that involves technology. I think that the best way to go about solving this problem—as much as possible—will be to create assignments that involve the use of technology but do not make it impossible for students without much experience to do well. Additionally, all assignments will have detailed resources to guide students that need it. The classroom is the best place to learn about using technology because a student has a safe environment to ask questions and is ready to learn.

            There are several different types of software that can be used by teachers in the classroom.  The types of software that I think would be the most useful to me as a teacher are probably those that fall into the application software for active learning category. This productivity software will be for functions such as word processing and data arrangement and analysis. It will also include presentation software—despite having been created primarily for business it also has a very useful application in the classroom for organizing ideas visually in such a way that makes it easy for students to understand.  Educational games software will be another type of software that will be incredibly useful to me as a teacher because it will help students maintain interest and a topic while also learning and practicing. Games that involve puzzles and plays off of classic games as well as ‘educational arcade games’ will engage students.  This is also useful because of its availability online.

I’m thinking one of the less useful types of software for me as a teacher will be imaging software and photo editing software.  This software Will allow students to manipulate pictures to do things like changing the size of the image as well as the image format, changing the light, correcting redeye, and many other things. While this may be useful for me as a teacher to use, myself I do not think that student projects outside of art classes will focus so heavily on Image modification

The E-course talked about three different types of technology; video conferencing, cloud computing, and project management. As a student, the most useful and relevant of these technologies are from the first two categories. I have already taken a video class here at the university and I have always thought that this has been one of the more useful courses I have taken. Also, cloud computing can be very useful as a student. I did not know much about his before this course but I have been in several group projects that I think would have been much better/ more productive if I had known about these technologies—particularly real time collaborative editing.

As far as the functioning of the E-course is concerned deleting that I had a real problem with as far as versatility is that I was only able to skip forward and backwards through the recordings by several minutes. I would prefer for the video play function to allow me to rewind buy smaller intervals. Also, the video navigation function was not available for the third part of the lesson—that is the project management unit. As I was taking notes the video continued, making it difficult for me to follow along.

 Overall I liked the format of the course—I could choose which unit I wanted to work in which was nice.  I also liked the introductory ‘conversations’ before each lesson.  I thought they were cute and entertaining. I thought the graphics were nice but it might also be fun with a more colorful theme.  I think that this E-course was a unique an entertaining way to have a lesson.