Week 1

So I was thinking about the readings from this week and I never realized how much education has changed for students. Being a member of the new, so-called, Digital Natives I found that the articles we read this week were very accurate. The way my generation, and the ones that are to follow, have grown up is very different from that of our parents or for that matter our teachers. Students are walking into classrooms almost knowing more, technologically speaking, than those of their educators. I was personally the most interested in the article regarding using students as a means to modify curriculum. Honestly, what is a better way to educate students then to know what they are truly interested in? Educators have spent so much of their time force feeding information that is "important" for the students to learn without every really knowing if they were interested. Maybe this is the reason there are so many college students that repeatedly change their majors, perhaps they think someone is just going to tell them what to do. If someone had asked me, in Elementary or Middle School, what I was truly interested in learning though I may not have had a Board of Education approved answer. The only downfall I see is that maybe students have no idea what the are really interested in, maybe it takes those years of English, Science, Math, Foreign Language and P.E. for them to find their own paths. But I think it is important to have them in the decision making process. Maybe not to fully base the curriculum around their wants and needs because that would be a Constructivist ideal that I don't think, as a teacher, I would feel comfortable accommodating. Constructivism, in theory, is a great idea - curbing the curriculum to a more "child-centered" approach in order to engage the students with their personal interests. However brilliant that idea it's unlikely to be fully accomplished, in my opinion. If 25 students walked into my classroom with 25 different interests there would be no way to cater to them all. I think that's why differentiation is so important because then educators can at least appeal to different learning styles.
The other information I read about this week was about Blogging, which I have a new found interest in because I'm participating in it! The generation I will be faced with in my future career will have probably already been bloggers and very technologically savvy. I completely agree that there needs to be technology in the classroom because students deal with technology on a daily basis. No longer do students need to go to the actual dictionary to look up words, instead they visit dictionary.com. There seem to be an infinite number of resources that students can access through the web. Being able to control that access is where schools seem to draw the line. I personally plan on using a lot of technology in my classroom. I'm pursuing being a foreign language teacher, and to me, there is no better way to bridge a foreign country with the classroom then through the internet. And some of these articles encouraged me to think about using blogs as another technological aspect to my classroom. I found it interesting that one article said that students are bored in class, not because of the subject, but rather because what they do outside of the classroom, technologically, is more stimulating. That, to me, is really interesting! Simple lecture just doesn't cut it anymore (which even as a continuing college student I can understand!). There needs to be technology in every classroom to keep the students' interest. I guess it's true that as educators we need to "get up to par", so to speak, with the true digital natives so that our subject material doesn't fall upon "deaf ears". So that's what I was thinking....