Technology

Educational Technology is a crucial aspect to all teachers curriculum's. After taking a class in Ed Tech, I have come to the conclusion that there are three areas of importance that really stood out to me. These areas include… Creativity and innovation, Communication and collaboration and Research and information fluency.

The first area…Creativity and Innovation is an extremely important aspect of education. This area allows students to apply existing knowledge to gain new ideas. This area relies on the connections the students are able to make. This could be a self to world connection, self to text connection or whatever the connection happens to be. This also follows a similar format that the students learn when studying literature. These connections could be implemented into new areas; especially technology. It is advantageous to allow students to expand their creativity. Technology gives students another outlet for this expansion. Students can use technology such as blogging, shared documents, video recording and conferencing to help inspire their creative side. A down side to this is that it may require some teaching as to how to use this technology. The upside is that none of these are very complicated and they are becoming ever easier to use as time goes on. The works created are all their original work and can be portrayed in many different forms.

The next area of interest and importance is Communication and Collaboration. This ties directly into creativity also but its focus is that of using technology to communicate. Thing like Facebook would also fall into this area. We need to realize that some of these tools can be misused but under the correct supervision they could be incredibly valuable teaching sources. Things like Facebook can be used in a classroom environment to communicate assignments and when it is tied into a document sharing service such as Google Docs it becomes even more convenient. To further more this, it can all be tied into a Skpye account to allow students to all work together on a project or projects. The downfall to all this would be having a limited technology at home or at school but the upside is that it really doesn’t take that much technology to accomplish any of these. The internet allows us to communicate in a variety of ways; we need to use this technology to help educate children.

The last area of interest to me is Research and information fluency. Using internet research tools and bookmarking sites, students can flawlessly visit websites and book mark those sites, making research projects quicker and more streamlined. Students can learn how to use specific trade journals in order to ascertain the accuracy of the information they obtained. Teachers can use the same technology to help evaluate students and track their improvements. There is a variety of research tools available to both students and teachers. A great place to start to find these applications is through Google. They offer a lot of free applications that work flawlessly with each other across the internet. Google Scholar is merely one example f such a source. This area may include some planning but the student will be able to plan him/herself the way they want to “approach” their research.

To conclude…The world is using technology everywhere, if we don’t use this technology in our classrooms, we will be doing the students and the future rulers of the world a grave injustice. Technology is not an option, it is what is running to world.