Final thoughts on Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work & Society

My class, Understanding the impact of technology on education, work and society, has helped me by providing technology resources that I can integrate into my classroom. While I was aware that blogs and pod casts were out there, I was unaware of wikis. I had colleagues to bounce ideas off of, and I learned how to use these technology tools within the confines of my districts’ set guidelines. I learned and used more technology in these past eight weeks than in the last five years combined.

I believe what I have experienced through class assignments and my own classroom experiences have served to strengthen my belief that education needs to be student, not teacher, centered. As was stated in “Bringing the Fun into Teaching with Technology,” if the teachers move out of the way and the students take control of their own learning they will exceed even their own expectations.

I have moved away from even typing things into the desktop attached to the LCD projector in the room, because I believe that my students need to do what they can for themselves. They need to be given permission to explore and push their own comfort zones.

I believe that I need to stay connected with some of my classmates as we move away from this class. There were so many good ideas coming from so many wonderful teachers that now I know I have these resources as well. I will continue to seek out information from places like commoncraft.com, which made each new application seem much less intimidating to me as a digital immigrant. I have already subscribed to that source. I will also push to have more conversations in my building about how to get technology in the hands of the students that we seem to be failing. Achievement tests are more than just content tests, they are also about student esteem and knowing how to think. I believe we will see amazing improvements in some of our underachievers when we start connecting them with current technologies that speak to them as our slower paced classrooms have not.

Within the next year I would like to reform my math daily sign-in to be digital, preferably by posting it to a blog that can open up communication between parents, students and teachers. I believe that this can be accomplished in class with the use of one or two desktops (what I currently teach with). I am working on a permission slip for the parents, to explain the importance of communicating in new and different ways and the benefit they can reap by getting involved and even posting themselves. Within the next two years I would like to be able to send a project based homework assignment home each week. This will require I research all the alternative ways to approach such a project for the students that would have true difficulty acquiring technology at home.