Digital Blog post #B

Chapter 2

The first topic of chapter 2 that I want to talk about is the teaching philosophy. The book mentions two primary types of teaching methods; Teacher-centered and student-centered. Teacher-centered is decribed as teaching as telling, meaning basically that the teacher lectures and the students listen. At the end, the teacher uses scores from tests to determine who learned the material and who did not.
Student-centered teaching is, according to the textbook, also called constructivist, progressive, project or problem based teaching. I would prefer student-centered teaching. Students should be challenged and kept interested by taking part in problem-solving projects or discovery based assignments and challenges. In preschool, I try to use many teachable moments. For example, when a child finds a caterpillar on the playground, we use a bug catcher to view discuss the form, look and colors of the caterpillar. We look up the name and species on a website and talk about what caterpillars eat and how they live. Many of our lesson plans are built around the interests of the children that we have observed and documented. I found a small video that explains teachable moments during the day. They can be all around us.

Also interesting was the section about digital natives and digital immigrants. The book says that all born since 1980 can be considered digital natives. I was born 1979 and I had my first experiences with Computer, Internet and E-mail writing when I was 15. Slowly, It was more and more integrated in our environment. I started using pictures and texts from websites for schoolwork and noticed that some restaurants and companies dealing with customers created internet presentations on websites. I understand the reaction of the author from the textbook section who explained that he would expected an instruction manual for a tablet computer. I can imagine it must be overwhelming for people born earlier than 1975 to suddenly deal with all that new technology around us after using simple and traditional technology before. I also agree with the paragraph about teacher actions in the book on page 39. Teachers now have more opportunities to teach and more tools to use. I think, students still must be taught about traditional teaching materials like paper and pencil to write and books to read but some technology can be added in the daily lesson plan to show them all the tools it can provide to learn.
I found an article "Digital natives and digital immigrants:Teaching with technology"  by Ellen Marie Peterson Martin from Education Doctoral Thesis (2011). The article tells about a survey of 6 digital immigrant teachers and 6 digital native teachers. All of them had 1 to 5 years of teaching experiences as K-12 teachers. The survey revealed that there are more similarities than differences between digital natives and digital immigrants in regards to background experience and classroom technology use. Also it found out that accessibility and time are factors that influence classroom technology use by both digital natives and digital immigrants and situated learning is a vital part of technology learning and used by all new teachers regardless of whether they are digital natives or digital immigrants.

The third section I like to hang on to is "Apps for teaching and Learning" on page 25. It mentions Apple's marketing phrase "There is an App for that" which means that for every topic a user is interested in, there might be a small software program to download on smartphones or tablets. Now, apps are available for every brand of smartphones or other similar devices. The book also says that there are apps for just about every academic subject. When I started being interested in apps, I was looking for pre-reading apps for preschoolers and Letter recognition games to use in my classroom. I also introduced animated stories with words and sound to be read by the app. The children enjoyed that and couldn't wait to take turns on playing with the letter games and practicing their reading with the pre-reading software.

To conclude, I can say learning with new technology is fun and exciting for students and helpful for teachers. But we all should include a healthy mix of traditional teaching and learning methods and modern technology learning methods to keep our students interested.

Citation:


Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Chalk Preschool Online, Parent Information: Teachable Moments (2012) retrieved from  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyOmfGJct7o

Martin, Ellen Marie (Peterson), "Digital natives and digital immigrants: teaching with technology" (2011). Education Doctoral Theses. Paper 7. http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20002139

 https://magic.piktochart.com

Digital Blog Post #A

Chapter 1

While reading the chapter, I was thinking about how our generation in school had short movies and tape players as electronic resources. Now, the book describes the “digital childhood”. Children from earliest ages get access to TVs, computers, smartphones and many videogames and videogame devices. When I go to work everyday as a preschool and afterschool teacher, I see that every day. We provide electrocic learning recourses for the children to use. Several websites like "Starfall" help children to learn beginning reading skills and pronouncing letter sounds. Sometimes, I let applications on my tablet read electronic stories to them or the children use beginner reading and spelling applications on it.

This video I found on www.youtube.com discusses if modern technology is good or not good for young children starting from toddler age. 

It is enormous and sometimes surprising how much young children know about the use of computers and other technology. But modern technology also can be an unsafe environment for younger children. On special days, children at our school are allowed to bring their own electronic devices to play video games. Some of these devices give children access to the internet. I think, it makes it hard to control which websites they are visiting while using their own little screens on smartphones or tablets. To me, the safest device for them to use is our school/class computer where teachers have better access to control the websites students are visiting. 

The book also talks about the Igeneration. This is the name for the children who never saw a world without computers, cellphones, text messages and other interactive technologies. While our generation as children and adolescents kept in touch with friendas through the telephone and traditional mail, todays children use Facebook, twitter, Skype and e-mail to talk to each other. Also, homework for school aged children made easier. While our generation had to turn pages of books to prepare for homeworks or projects for school, today s children just need a few clicks to get to the information they need. 

This article "Teaching the IGerneration" by Larry D. Rosen tells how technology controls the life of our children and suggests how schools need to respond to that. 

The book describes technology and the work of a teacher. Yes, I agree with the text that technology is a great reward of teaching. The book describes three primary ways. The first is “inside the classroom” where technology helps teaching the class. According to the book, tools listed are Power points, educational software and websites, student participation systems and teacher made blogs.

Like I mentioned, I use electronic stories and educational websites sometimes in my classroom. The second way is “Outside the Classroom” and some tools listed in the book are grade recordkeeping, research, home-school communication and educational networking. When I use the internet as a teacher, I do researching for projects and materials to use in my classroom and ideas to add into my weekly lesson plan. The third way of using technology as a teacher is Inside and Outside the classroom and some of the tools listed are Group projects, Homework assignments and creative writing. As a college student and full time working teacher, I attend online classes more than traditional class meetings. Some classes I attended used Learning software to submit assignments and do tests. Also these programs helped with examples and practice tests.

I am sure technology is very exciting and always developing further. It makes teachers and students lives much easier. We can work more closely with students trough internet and with the help of modern technology. Teachers, parents and family need to work together to help our children finding a safe, fun way of learning through new technology. 

Citations

The Denver Channel - 7 News (2013, July 28) - New technology causes concern about effect on childhood development (video file) retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpBdQQlPCJg

Maloy R, O'Loughin R, Edwards S (2013) Transforming Learning with new technologies, 2nd edition, Pearson Education

Rosen, Larry D. (2011, July) Teaching the Igeneration (article) retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/feb11/vol68/num05/Teaching-the-iGeneration.aspx