Week 5 Reading Response

Myths and Realities About Technology in K-12 Schools

I really enjoyed reading this article. It seemed to capture a lot of opinions and truths about teachers in today's society and trying to incorporate technology into the classroom effectively. I definitely agree with the response to myth # 1.

Myth # 1 Putting computers into schools will directly improve leanring; more computers will result in greater improvements.

The reality according to this article is that all this expensive technology will yield little educational progress unless schools and districts meet the needs for professional development, technical support, which I deal with a lot at my site, the availability of grade level software, etc.

Inorder for technology to benefit teachers and students, or education in general, a few basic needs have to be met. Knowledge is the key to educating all. Teachers have to be knowledgable with these new technologies inorder to effectively teach his/her students. But if teachers are to be expected to teach these new technologies and involve students with new programs and applications, then teachers need the resources to do so!

Chapter # 6: Community Building With Technologies
David Jonassen

Community building goes beyond just the classroom and school site. I always thought I developed good classroom community within my own classroom, but I guess I haven't really made that expansion to the outside world, meaning different classrooms around the world or even Arizona. I think this might be something I could try to do! I have writing penpals in KS, but it would be cool to incorporate collaborative/socializing technologies like: wikis and blogs to communicate back and forth. I think it is still important to teach students how to handwrite letters, but to increase student engagement and to also make sure students are learning and keeping up with new software technologies, incorporating various mediums to accomplish the same task is critical. The greatest question/goal is to find the right balance in teaching using the old strategies (paper-pencil) ways, and the new (virtual world) ways of teaching to our state standards.