Techonology Assessment

Assessing a very small school took very little time. It was quite amusing getting to know the technological culture of the private school I work at.

Although the school and the enrollment is modest, the technological capabilities are not behind the times. Almost every teacher has an interest in his or her classroom's technology components.

Just this past week I used http://www.youtube.com/ to show a short presentation of Rutherford's findings concerning experiments using the cathode ray tube and alpha particles. At least two other teachers are interested in the blog I created to help students keep track of assignments, and are now working on their own blogs. This past weekend was spent uploading names and grades into our new grading system. Just a few hours ago, one of our staff came across a projector in a surplus warehouse that simply needed a power cord to work, and thus our techonological inventory continues to grow.

After a few short phone calls, e-mails, and document scans, my anthropological analysis is complete. Please feel free to read my entire report.

Article Assessment 1

Michael Bauzon
michael_bauzon@hotmail.com
9/22/08

Listen to the Natives

Marc Prensky

Overview:

In Listen to the Natives, Prensky highlights the differences between students and teachers concerning use of digital technology in the schools and everyday life. He coins the terms digital native, referring to today's students, and digital immigrants, those who were not born into the digital world, to help readers get a better picture of the generation gap that exists between educators and students.

Prensky goes on about different instructional methods educators must use in order to successfully engage learning for digital natives. According to Prensky, digital tools like cell phones, blogs, podcasts, video games, and web-based data storage can increase student collaboration both in and out of the classroom.

Article Reference Points:

• Digital Natives refer to today's students, fluent in digital computer language, video games, and the internet.
• Digital Immigrants are those who are not born into the digital world.
• Teachers must encourage decision making among students, involving students in designing instruction and getting input from students about how they would teach.
• The cell phone is one of the most important 21th century tools.
• Herding is students' involuntary assignment to specific classes or groups. This does not benefit students.
• One alternative to herding is one-to-one personalized instruction
• The other alternative to herding is having students select their own groups, not necessarily restricted to the classroom.
• Programming is the key skill necessary for 21st century literacy, and many students are already proficient in programs such as Flash.

Reflection:

I'm not fond of most of Prensky's solutions to bridging the generation gap between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants within the classroom. I agree that students should use digital tools and that many teachers need to learn how to integrate usage of these tools in their curriculum, but using video games to teach literacy and algebra is not effective.

Student engagement, one of the more important aspects of teaching and learning, can hardly be focused on algebra through most digital tools. While it's true that the subject matter might be presented in a more entertaining fashion, the old pencil-and-paper way of doing math homework is still the most effective method. Video games to teach math? I predict more distraction than learning.

In my curriculum, lesson planning, and delivery, the digital tools mentioned in the article-camera phones, googledocs, blogs, Flash, wikis, etc- are of little to no worth. I do use a class blog to post homework, quotes, and notes to the classes. Other than that, I still teach math on the big board in the front of the room. As a teacher the most I can take away from the article is a knudge toward learning math-effective teaching technologies such as smart boards, tablet PCs, blogs, and of course the graphing calculator.

Futuring

How would you "grade" or assess Fox Becomes a Better Person, and School Train?

Fox Becomes a Better Person and School Train were assignments that required students to actively engage in learning. Any time a work has to be demonstrated, the effort and time taken to produce it is revealed. If very little time was needed and the project exceeded the outcome guidelines, then you are possibly dealing with a talented group.

I personally thought School Train got to be a little annoying after the first minute-and-a-half, but I'm sure the students had a blast producing it. The music, although hardly appealing to me, gave me an idea of what may appeal to younger generations. Reciting the Spanish words along with English helped me to learn what some words meant. The grading of this assignment would depend on the guidelines laid out. For example, if I required the following:

• Make the presentation appealing to an audience your age (music, color, etc.)
• Attempt to teach your audience a few words in another language
• Use music, color, and pictures of members of your group

then I would give this project a high grade.

Fox Becomes a Better Person was another fun and creative work that required effort and talent. I would give a high grade to this project as well, mostly because the student acted the whole story out. The background was fun to watch and the drawings were way better than anything I could come up with.

Epic 2015

As the story progressed, I almost forgot to "disengage" reality after 2008. I was caught up with the rate at which communication was growing, the mergers between giants, and how prevelant media was in everyday life. Oh, wait... that's happening now. Although these were only predictions of possible business ventures, I don't believe they're that far from reality.

In the classroom, electronic communication has become almost mandatory. As I'm writing this, I'm thinking about setting up a blog for my students to post homework assignments, contact info, lessons, cheat sheets, etc. Later today I'm going to enter grades into an online gradebook, which means I'll probably have to write and will receive e-mails to and from parents. Our school newsletter is online. A teacher down the hall just e-mailed me a request for our chemistry lab. Every classroom has a computer with online access for grades and projects. The home site for all of them: http://www.google.com/.

Sabrina's Journey

This is a simple and effective way to break the ice among students. Young people love to share about themselves-hence myspace and facebook's popularity. With my own students, I would do something very similar, but focus the topic on my curriculum. For example, in the beginning of the year I would have students gather images and narrate things they already know about math and things they would like to learn about. That would give me ideas for projects and developing units. At the end of the year, I would have another presentation about what they've learned, and then compare the two for an assessment.