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

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