Weekly Blog 1

I think that the most important thing I came away with from class last Thursday was a new way of looking at today’s changing technology and it’s relation to teaching. It’s obvious that technology is always changing. It became clear to me after class that as technology evolves so too will methods of teaching. I came to realize that as future teachers, we must all look for ways that the wealth of new technology can be used as an effective tool to help students learn. These revelations naturally lead to a myriad of questions. In what ways can some of the new technologies help improve the way educators teach? Are old methods of teaching becoming obsolete as technology improves? How do you determine if a new technology is a distraction or useful teaching tool? How can social networking sites be used in education? These are all questions that I hope will become topics of discussion later in the course. I realize that many of my questions may not have clear answers. I do feel that much of what we learned about social networking can potentially have some applications to classroom practice. We focused a lot of attention to Twitter in class. I was impressed about how easily opinions and information could be shared through this online community. I could see social networking sites such as Twitter possibly being used in the classroom in the near future. To what extent still yet to be seen.