Week 1, Post 2: Why integrate technology into the classroom?

     As I mentioned on the previous post, technology is the new age.  Children, adults, grandparents are incorporating more and more complicated technology into their everyday lives.  Future jobs require technologically savvy individuals.  Day to day living requires more technological knowledge.  So if schools exist to prepare children to be contributors to society then technology training has to be a major component to the lessons.  In order to become beneficial to our future country, students need to be creating, thinking outside the box, learning how to be hard workers, analyzing, and inventing using up-to-date and different forms of technology everyday.
  As teachers it is important to make learning meaningful to the students.  Whether it is math, science, health, or gym class students need to feel that what they are learning will benefit them in some way.  They need to understand that what they are learning will help them become successful in their lives and careers.  As the video A Vision of K-12 Students Today showed, some students are feeling they are continuing to learn in an old fashion, unbeneficial way; they have a very good reason to feel this way.  By not using technologies in the classroom teachers are not preparing their students for the world they will be facing.  Knowing where your students come from and the world they are going to face will help in creating meaningful lessons.
     As I am studying to become an teacher to English language learners (ELLs) I like to finish my posts by examining how ELLs are affected by the presented topics.  It may be possible that the English language learners in your classroom may not have internet access at home, own a cell phone, ever have touched a computer, or dealt with technology in the English language.  This makes it that much more important to use technology in the classroom.  Since we are preparing all students for a technological world it is important that all students interact with and use a variety of technology in order to get the same exposure as others.

Imagine:  What will happen after they graduate to the student who never owned a computer?

Week 1, Post 1: KWL

     Technology is everywhere in my daily life.  If you could only see me now, I am writing this on my laptop which is connected to the free wi-fi in my hotel room, the television is on in the background (which my roommate is watching while I am fully engaged in my homework), my cell phone is announcing when I receive a text message, letting me know when someone messages me on Facebook and flashing when I receive emails.  Technology is something that is easily forgotten or easily gotten used to.  Even with all of this technology around me simultaneously I still had to concentrate in order to identify it.  Remember when we thought it was crazy that our cell phones could take pictures and blink different colors, now look at them.  When it comes to technology we have the attention span of a nat.  It is exponentially changing around us and in order to keep up with our digitally native students we have to keep an open mind, submit to the changes, and move with the times.
     Looking in to most of the public school's classrooms it looks like you are peering through a time portal to the 1980s.  Out on the street you see hybrid cars parallel parking without the help of their drivers, people listening to their iPods while their Rascal carries them along, someone puffing on a smokeless, tobacco free cigarette while the GPS on their touchscreen, 3D cell phone tells them where to go.  Now walk into a modern day classroom and you will be lucky to see a couple desktop computers.  As heard in the video Did You Know 3.0, we are preparing students for jobs that don't even exist and that use technology that hasn't even been invented yet.
     Going to this class I thought I was pretty up-to-date with technological knowledge.  I use all forms of it daily and have a side job working online but I knew I needed ideas on how to incorporate this into classroom lessons.  At the NNETESOL conference last year I went to a presentation on digital story telling.  She provided us with different websites to check out but I left still feeling I needed more examples and practice.  The text book, Leading 21st Century Schools, mentioned that 87% of students have internet access at home but since the English language learning community tends to be more impoverished that percentage seems quite high.  I am hoping that this class not only prepares me to use more technology in the classroom but touches on how to use more with students and a classroom with limited resources.