First Impressions - Reflections on 504

At first glance, based on the description of our "Teaching with Technology" course, I thought we were going to have our class meetings in some kind of computer lab, like the one on the third floor of the SoE. I knew what room number we were meeting in today; however, it wasn't until I was 20 feet away from the door when I made the connection: this course is just as accelerated as the rest of our SecMac courses and will be held in various venues based on that week's schedule!

This is not just another generic "techy" course.  I fell into the common student perspective trap that this class was going to center around computers and be a course where the instructor resides solely in the front of the room expecting all of the students to follow along step by step: a course where some students don't understand how to use the tools, while other students don't think they need to pay close attention because of their previously attained computer skills, yet they all miss out on the lesson in one way or another.  But this class is different.  Not just because of the room choice but also the way we are to bring our own computers, we are assigned readings on teaching with technology, and the allocation of time awarded to class discussion, q&a, etc. compared to actually working with computers in class.  This course emphasizes using technology, specifically our blogs, podcasts, etc, outside of class!  Very cool.

Now onto the actual content of what occurred in class today! Even though the class discussion on the Sheskey reading was interesting and provided an appropriate forum for the discourse of our thoughts, the assignment and post-discussion were both somewhat expected.  Yes, this course is about technology and we need to read and learn about teaching with these new and improved forms of technology and everyone has their own opinions on the matter, but it follows the same boring pattern.  That is why I was excited to discus the NY Times article on banning soda in New York.

It was somewhat of a curveball to be given a reading assignment on soda bans in New York for a course on technology.  I knew the discussion would be very opinionated in terms of how all of us felt about the issue of banning and where people would take their arguments.  J took it all the way to the time of Prohibition, and K brought up the point that being told what to do was the main reason America was formed.  I'm still somewhat fuzzy on how we can relate it back to teaching with technology, but the correlation between the article and teaching itself (in our respective content areas) was made - we can bring up relevant events such as soda banning in New York to models in the past for Social Studies, experiments on sodas and their health aspects for Science, maybe making argumentative platforms and highlighting the art of debate or impact of persuasive language for English and Language Arts.  If someone outside this course had walked into our classroom, he/she probably would not have known that this is a technology course.

The instructors made a point that soon we would be relating the idea of banning and how we could incorporate it into our teaching through technology.  This is where the point is made in Sheskey's reading that not all technology use in class is beneficial, especially if a pen and paper don't cost as much.  Going even further with this point, I would like to mention that the use of visual content would also be beneficial to students since not everyone learns in the same forms (i.e. auditorily, physically, visually, etc) as stated by our instructors in our 511 course.  In other words, using technology provides visual triggers that engage students on another cognitive level than just lecturing the content at students.

This is our job as future teachers: to actively search new ways to incorporate new and emerging (and hopefully effective) technology that will allow for greater levels of interest, motivation, and of course, learning, to be attained within every student in our classroom.  This is why we want to teach!  (This was also touched on in class today!)  We want our students to succeed because we had teachers who motivated us to succeed when we were younger.  And I don't just mean academically success - I am talking about life success here people.  And as we learned in our literacy classes, specifically from the Ritchhard reading on "intellectual character, " achieving the ability to live independently and to apply those dispositions to real life settings - that is intelligence.