Week 4 Reflection

My new delicious account is:
http://www.delicious.com/cnpyke

Social bookmarking could be extremely useful for students, teachers, administration, and people in general.  Teachers could use a wiki to make a website for their students.  Students could then use delicious to keep track of all of their teachers websites, helpful websites for their classes and/or life, interests, and so on.  Instead of "losing" websites or having to save them all on your bookmark, you could just use social bookmarking instead.  Then you can also share the websites.  I feel like this is already being done on Facebook.  For example, my cousin was in the newspaper last week so she posted the article on Facebook.  Then we could all click on the article and read it.  If she wants to be able to find that article forever (or until the news takes it down) she could bookmark it and save it.  She wouldn't have to keep checking back on her Facebook and try to find it whenever she wanted to show off to someone.

Going back to how you can use this in education.  Administrators can keep track of certain websites that are most useful.  This week in one of our meetings, most of the teachers lost the website to help them make their professional development plan.  Another teacher (who still had it), had to send out another email to everyone.  If everyone just kept track of their websites, this huge issue could have been eliminated or easily solved.  A lot of time wasted for nothing!

I have been finding websites on my delicious that I would like to use in my classroom.  They are to help my students or to help me plan better lessons.  It just depends on what I am looking for.  I have also found some personal websites that I like to look at it!  Now I can easily organize all of my websites so that I can find what I am looking for in a timely manner.

In chapter 1, we read about the definition of educational technology.  It was really interesting how it use to be a 'process', 'design and use', and surrounded by media.  Now days, it is more about facilitating learning and improving performance.  That is how I would like to start using technology in my classroom.  I want my students to understand more, faster, and gain mastery.  Instead of keeping all of my students on one pace, I think that technology can help you differentiate the learning that is going on.  I can have students working on different assignments at the same time or to different levels of the assignment.  While using direct instruction in class, you always have a student behind, on track, and ahead.  Using technology can help each student meet different goals and learn as much as they can.  I think that it will improve performance and help make learning more fun.

To me what is missing in this chapter is how to use the technology in order to gain the goals that I have for myself and my students.  I want to try new things in my classroom, but I am not sure how to get started or how to 'train' my students to be ethical while using technology.  I also see a lot of negatives that are getting in the way:  who is going to pay for the technology?  What happens when the technology decides not to work? Are my students really getting ahead?  How can I measure this?

To me there are just a lot of unanswered questions and I am hoping that through this semester more of my questions get answered so I can start using more technology in my classroom in order to help my students get the most out of their education.