My Style

I really enjoyed reading Davids' blog. As far as technology goes, I am very indifferent on whether to utilize it more or not utilize it at all. If were talking about elementary age students, I think it is too much information in such a small time. At this age, children are being forced to learn so much, from learning to walk in a straight line to addition and subtraction of single digit numbers and that may not seem like a lot for an adult but when it comes to a child who doesn't really have the attention spand for hardly anything it could almost be painful in way. Forcing them to learn how to blog or to take part in a group collaboration, is pretty ridiculous. The most I ever did on a computer, was paint and maybe take an Accelerated Reading test and that was it and maybe once I reached 3rd grade or something like that I may have been exposed to researching but it was all in small amounts. I think that, this type of technology should not be in a classroom of any kind that contains students under the age of 10.

Now, if you are talking about middle to high school level of teaching, I would totally agree that more intense technology should be used; especially once you got into college. I still don’t believe that blogging should be used very much, if at all, in middle school because kids are still adapting and learning and if somehow they get off into the wrong blog; it could possibly be very dangerous. High school students are more aware of what is going on and what a safe blog is and what bad blog is and they can avoid stuff like that if they so chose. At this age, students are doing research projects, biographical essays, and utilizing the computer and the resources within it, in almost every class, at least once or twice a year. Yet, I still don’t believe this type of technology, blogging, should be used in high school. College, defiantly yes! I don’t really care to blog other than Facebook but I do think it is a good tool to know how to use and to be comfortable using. If I were to use some of these tools in setting up a project for my class to do, I would defiantly have to be teaching high school or older. For example, I might have them do a project over the Holocaust and within that project they would have to create a collaborative google document, using the information that they each gathered about the Holocaust and submit it to me. Then they would have to present the information to the class, either by a collaborative slide show or by creating a group webpage and publishing it.