Blog Post # F

(Created via Canva by Amanda Sweeney)

Being in a classroom certainly has its challenges. One of the biggest, and most widely known, is the fact that funding for education isn’t as high as it ought to be, which begs each teacher to be creative with his or her curriculum and use their resources wisely. I found three concepts in our text this week that relate to being resourceful by using technology both in the classroom and behind the scenes for the instructor.

The first concept that struck my attention is virtual field trips. I must admit that I have a bad experience with something similar to this when I was in elementary school: One day my third grade teacher informed the class that we would be going on a field trip the following Monday. She reminded the class every day that we were going to go on an exciting adventure come Monday morning. The classroom was a buzz talking about this surprise trip, how we should dress, what we would have for lunch- everything was speculated. I remember telling my mom about it and she was confused- she worked at the school and didn’t recall my teacher mentioning that there was a class trip. This was my first indication that something different was happening with this trip. Come Monday morning the class was surprised- our teacher was in a dress, like she normally was, and heels, also like she normally was. Wouldn’t she have dressed more comfortable? Finally she told us all to close our eyes because we were getting ready to go on our trip! Confused, we did just that. It was then that she described to us our “transport back in time to the DINOSAUR ERA!”…uh…what? This was our big trip? We read from a book about dinosaurs for another hour or so and then moved on to other material. To say that the class was disappointed is an understatement.  With that being said, I feel like the teacher’s approach was all wrong in my personal experience. With the possibility of virtual field trips now easily accessed online, students can again get excited about going on a trip and not actually leaving the classroom. They can fully submerse themselves in the new location with great visualization and in many cases, the ability to “explore” a city, museum or Wonder of the World through the advanced technology of 360 cameras and live feeds. In fact, as our text points out, many options are available for virtual field trips. You can involve the whole class, or portions of a class while the other portion works on material they need extra help with. Here is an example of an Amazon Rainforest virtual field trip through YouTube:

(via YouTube.com)

With the example of virtual field trips also comes my next focus for this week- Technology Integration Issues. Not all schools have abilities to display online content on a large SmartBoard, for instance, or have the ability to assign each student to a computer as they navigate new material by their own exploration on the internet. In my personal experience, the school district that I will be teaching in does not have issues with technology integration. Lee County School District has seen the immense value that having technology in the classroom has and therefore has equipped majority of classrooms with more than enough technology options for the instructor to use with the students. Other Districts have not yet incorporated this important advancement yet, however. And, even if every district were able to afford technology integration, other barriers stand in the way of teachers using technology.

For instance, as our text points out, teachers may have an unwillingness to change their lesson plans to incorporate technology (Maloy,2013 pg. 303), and teachers may also be unconstructive with the technology they do have in their classrooms- possibly by using it as a reward or punishment which isn’t an optimal way of using technology for an educational venture.

(via Pixabay)

The final, and I feel most important, technological aspect of our reading this week is websites for educational use and networking. In my experience in a similar field, networking is a huge component of not only developing strong connections with others in the same career. Here is a Prezi presentation that I made showing some of these valuable resources:
Resources:

A. S. (2016, April 24). Dinosaur trip [Digital title for blog]. Retrieved April 24, 2016, from https://www.canva.com/design/DABxapD2bxQ/wX2815aTvpTxP0B72h6wKA/view?utm_content=DABxapD2bxQ&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=sharebutton  

Pixabay. (2016, April 1). [Commuications, internet, icons]. Retrieved April 24, 2016, from https://pixabay.com/en/communication-icons-internet-media-1296385/

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc