Teaching+with+Technology+Week+1+Update

This week I began my second course called Teaching with Technology. I am particularly excited about this class because teaching is where my passion lies and incorporating technology is just an added bonus! I am learning so many new things that I sometimes feel overwhelmed, but I look forward to the challenge. This week's videos introduced me to the course and shared three main schools of thought with regard to teaching technology - constructivist, connectivist, and cyborg. Both constructivism and connectivism are familiar to most teachers as they are the norms that many of us follow. Constructivism is taking one's prior knowledge about something and building new knowledge around it; this is a skill I most often relate to teaching in reading a new story or book. Connectivism is taking knowledge we have and being able to connect it to another information source to learn something new. The key to this strategy is making sure students and teachers know where to find the information. The third strategy, cyborg, involves the interaction between humans and machines through the use of chip implants. Personally, this one kind of freaks me out and reminds me of Star Trek in the 90's when the Borg where introduced.

Our readings this week again focused on these three strategies mentioned above, as well as incorporating technology with instruction. One of the books for this class is //Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works// and discusses the Marzano strategies that Garland ISD has been focusing on for the past two years. The text offered samples of technology tools that can be incorporated into each of the nine strategies such as word processing, spreadsheets, multimedia, and web resources to name a few. I am really looking forward to reading the upcoming chapters which goes into greater detail on how these tools relate to each strategy. Each week, I have the opportunity to share my thoughts on a quote that stood out to me for the week with my class online and I would like to share it here also. It comes from another text I am reading //titled Web 2.0 New Tools, New Schools// where the authors state, "What makes the difference is preparing students with 21st-century skills using a flexible approach rather than teaching just what will be tested." This stood out to me in many ways, one of the most major in being how we want to continue to be progressive leaders and have our children ready to take the lead in this ever changing and advancing society if we do not help them gain the tools needed to be successful. I can see the desire in so many of our students, and I want for them to be successful in this endeavor.