Archive for January, 2008
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Hello EDTS 523! I have to say that the power point in Thurs. class made me feel a little computer illiterate. I had no idea that there was technology out there that was so customized for today’s youth. Now, I would like to teach English at the high school level and I was blown away when he showed up that the Mac has a program where it actually reads what you typed back to you.
The reason why I liked that so much is because whenever I am working in a school the students always struggle with editing…and I do too. I was always trained to read aloud what I just wrote to see if it made sense. The problem with that is, I read it the way I want it to sound, looking right over all the grammatical errors (also a problem with the students). Which is why peer revision is so necessary, but, the idea of the computer reading back what you wrote blew my mind and is something that I would like to utilize on a regular basis with a writing assignment. Even if it is just practice with fixing broken sentences where the student can decide where to put in or take out a comma to create an easy flowing sentence. However, I also found it necessary that to work with something like technology we, as teachers, need to make sure that it fits into our lessons.
It was touched on in the power point and I really do agree with it. I can point back to hundreds of times in high school when my class would sit in the computer lab and work on a topic we covered a month ago and the only reason we are doing it now is because this was the time they had reserved the lab for. I had teachers that were so focused on spending time in the computer lab, that they really did not care what we did. There we even classes where we brought in our papers we were working on and worked on them…during class. Now, it was not like the teacher was reading all of our work, we simply asked her if we had questions, saved our work to out floppy discs and when the bell rang, left. Looking back, I think it would have been really neat to bring the paper I was working on in and have the computer or a peer read it back to me. To me, that would have been more beneficial than typing my paper.
Sorry for stressing about the Mac read back, but, it really hit on something I would like in my classroom someday!
Blog 1 of 18
Hello EDTS-523 Section 32! My name is Kristin Merman-Smith and this is my first blog for the semester. I graduated from Suny Geneseo last semester and for one of my classes we did “posts” which was similar to this, however, it was run through Geneseo’s webpage, so it was not quite on the web.
I am not sure exactly what to write about in terms of content, but, based on the first class I am now thinking it is not going to be as bad as I originaly thought. I am nervous about projects all needing to be done on Mac computers, because I am not very farmiliar with them…meaning- the only ones I have access to are at Nazareth. I am in the crowed the commutes, works 30 hours a week and am taking 4 classes, so, I am just going to have to hope for the best.
In terms of our class, I was aware of the shift in technology and saw my prefessors at Geneseo struggling with it when it came to projects. The whole idea of “poster boards” seemed to be out of style and power points, movies created on computers, Smart Boards were now the way to do a project. However, I can not possibily tell you how many hours of class were wasted trying to set-up the technology so that the person could present! It was annoying, which is why whenever I had a project I did the good old “poster board” technique. It was never the most eye catching presentation, but, it didn’t take 20 minutes to set-up either. Now, I am not saying that the shift in technology is annoying. Those who did thier projects on savvy power points, or created a DVD were really neat and different. I am just waiting for the day when we can understand this technology enough to utilize it efficiently rather then taking 20 minutes to call the “tech team”.
Kmerman9's Weblog 