This Video really opened my eyes as to how fast technology is growing and that if you don't keep up you will be left behind. I had no idea that so many Chinese people spoke English and that it would someday soon be the number one English speaking country in the World. The United States seems to be falling behind countries like India and China in the race for new technology.
I believe we as a country need to put more emphasis in teaching our young people about different technology and that we as teachers should be willing to learn the most we can about new things. I was really shocked with the amount of people that were using google searches these days. The number is growing every year by large numbers. I am amazed at how many people are using social networking sites these days and how popular that has become in the World. I knew it was popular in the United States but did not know the whole world was using these sites so much.
MR. Winkle Wakes
This video is about a man who wakes up after one hundred years and finds out the world has changed and that new technology is almost everywhere he goes. There are computers and electronic devices everywhere around him in this new world he awakes to. He is very uncomfortable with all this new stuff and just wants to go somewhere that seems normal to him. He gets sick and goes to the hospital only to find that technology is there also. There are computers and machines that keep alive everywhere in there.
Mr. Winkle finally finds somewhere where life is normal. He goes to a school. He is happy to find that things are back to the same and he can finally relax. There are students who are writing notes on paper and teachers who are lecturing. The only sign of technology is an old computer that is dusty. I think this video paints a good picture of what some schools are like in our country today. Many schools do not have the resources and material they need to become technology literate. They are living in the past and being left behind the world when it comes to learning new things. I know there are some exceptions and some schools are doing a better job today,but we need to strive as teachers and educators to incorporate new technology in our classrooms when we teach.
Sir Ken Robinson : The Importance Of Technology
I enjoyed listening to Sir Ken Robinson very much. He was very funny at times, but made his point in a very strong way. His main point in the video is the lack of creativity in schools today. We teach students the things we think are important and put so much emphasis on those things that we forget to let them use their minds and be creative. We emphasize reading, math ,and english but do not take a lot of time with other subjects that we deem not important.
This video opened my mind up to what is happening in our schools today. We don't let students be who they are and learn stuff they are interested in. If they don't do good in the core subjects we look at them as failures and just assume they are not smart or intelligent. We should allow our students to be creative and explore the world they live in and not just what we want them to learn. We should give them more time for art and other electives that they are interested in learning and not try to change who they are or who they want to become one day. We are really stopping their learning when we do these things.
Cecelia Gault
This article and interview by Cecelia Gault is very good. I was surprised that Finland kids do so well in school. There is no such thing as failing in school. They have shorter days at school. I think maybe the reason they do so well is that they are not stressed as much as kids elsewhere because they cannot fail. I think that in our country we may put too much pressure on kids to get a good grades and that makes them nervous and only focused on remembering something just so they can pass a test instead of actually learning new things. I think we need to use other things instead of just grades to evaluate if a student is really learning or not.
The interview with Sir Ken Robinson was very informative also. I also think we should put more emphasis on the arts and science subjects and allow kids to be more creative. According to Sir Ken Robinson, we think only certain kids are creative and all the others are just not. I too think every kid is creative and we need to teach students to be more creative. One way to teach them to be more creative is to let them use the technology that we have access to. The world has more resources to learn today than ever before and we should take advantage of it to educate those we teach.
Vicki Davis
This video is about a teacher in a small rural town in Georgia teaching kids about technology. She is challenging students and allowing them to learn for themselves using technology. She has incorporated many things in the classroom to help these students in learning. She has them blogging with people around the world and sharing different ideas. She is allowing them to be creative and use their own ideas also.
I really think Vicki Davis is a wonderful teacher. She has prepared her students for the real world and the technology that is in place all around us today. I like her idea that she does not have to know everything about something to teach it. She allows her students to teach her new things and learns things with them together. I think by allowing her students to be creative she is making them think and find out information for themselves instead of just relying her to teach them.
This blog post was very informative and I also got to see where you stood on some of the issues that were raised in these videos. In Mr. Winkle Wakes you said that some schools do not have the funding for all the technological advances of these days, why is that and how can we change it? This is a hard question to answer because with all the budget cuts going on these days it would be hard to get the funding you would need to implement technology in schools. in your Sir Ken Robinson summary I liked the fact that we as teachers need to start adding more of the Arts into our lesson plans during the week. What I think would be hard with that is that teachers are stuck sticking to the material that will be on the next IQT for students. But I have been learning in my EDU 301 art class that there are ways to teach your core subjects with the Arts while still getting them ready for their test. In the Cecilia Gault description you said we should use different things to asses students besides grades. There is actually a school in New York that does this. They use performance and watch the child's progress over the months to track how well a student is doing. This is not a public school, of course. In some areas we can help change these things but in other aspects it is over are head. But I am willing to fight for it if it will improve a child's education. Great blog post!
ReplyDeleteWill you be a Vicki Davis kind of teacher?
ReplyDeleteBrittany: Great comment!