Blog Post #10

An open letter to educators- Revolution of Technology. "The institutional schools need to get into the new revolution, if not they will one day fail." Every classroom should have the access to communication through technology. This is hard because not every school has the money to offer students the oppurtunity to have awesome technology in the classroom and unfortunalty some schools would prefer it stay that way. Internet saves people money, its free as he said. We can do things on our own now just by simply looking up on the internet, that we used to have other people to do for us. The community needs to help the institutional education(schools) get all the technological tools they need. This is like he used in the example, that the institutional schools are just like the days of "Kings and Queens" when only people with the most money or that were born into the kingdom got the best of things. Education is about creativity and empowering students. Dan Brown makes a good point that school is most of the time all about memorizing. I have had so many classes where I have just say in class and either played on my phone or wanted to fall asleep because I was so bored. I would do this in the classes where I knew all I had to do was get the study guide before the test and memorize the answers. This is not learning, because learning we can benefit from. Memorizing is only useful for about a week, if that to do well on our test. Usually after the semester is over we don't remember anything we learned in the class. Morgan Bayda also talks about falling asleep in the classroom and how it affects students. Social networking can open up so many opportunities for us, for her it helped her get a volunteering job in Costa Rica, that didn't cost her much money on top of it. Just by putting on twitter one day how frustrated she was, someone tweeted her a helpful website to use. As educators, we need to make sure our students are making good use of technology and we're not behind. There is so much available information on the internet we can use to help students in the classroom




Pencil Intergration- This was a very interesting post and the principal in this post seems very ignorant. I can't believe there has actually been a study done on whether or not a student performs better on standarized tests if he uses a pencil at home. That has got to be the craziest thing I have ever heard. It's not about the pencil when a student takes a test, it's about the knowledge that they know. The principal was just assuming the teacher was going to have low scores from the beginning because the students took their pencils home. This teacher seems like a great teacher, because he gets the students to be interactive at home and do fun projects. Students will be alot more interested in school, if it's fun for them. Thats why I think technology is going to be great in the schools for bettering education, because students love to be on computers. Especially for younger children, there are so many websites offered with games and lessons for the students to learn from.