Chapter 2

For this chapter I decided to answer Describe the importance of strategic thinking as a skill for teaching subject matter and content with technology. The first part of a strategy is designing a plan of how you are going to use technology without losing time because of students being bored or confused with the technology. It is best to start out with a technology that is somewhat familiar to the students or that does not take much time to give a detailed instruction in which the students can maneuver functionally within the technology. The book also mentions the subject of diversity, through the examples of tornados. It is important for the students to understand the basis of the content before they engage in the technological application, unless the technology is being used to introduce and education the content itself. Most importantly the most successful strategies involve the preparation and regulation of student's time and experiences with technology.

Umm, I do not really have any questions about this section because it is pretty much comparable to the book of Deuteronomy....Laws, rules, and regulations. Pretty dry stuff here. Well maybe I do have a question, though it may not be directly related to my previous paragraph. There seems to be a huge movement for learning and teaching with technology, and I am sure this has not just happened in the last year. When many teachers use technology effectively and more often than not, successfully, how are so many teachers using technology insufficiently or not at all? I wish I had a copy of this textbook to slam down on their desks. Powerpoint can be a great teaching tool if used correctly; I feel that ninety percent of the powerpoint based classes I have taken have incorrectly used technology. Cramming slides with more than three or four bulleted points just simple diverts attention from what the teacher is saying and rather leads it to a scribbling contest to write down every word before the next slide approaches. Technology is great and should be used in all classrooms; technology helps kids understand content in different ways. In my high-school, I used technology in a lot of my classes, but not all. I feel that all of the awesome and free applications found on the internet could have been extremely helpful in all of the classes which were stricken with dry erase and marker.

Chapter 10

Differentiate blogs from diaries and traditional journals and ways they can be used to guide student learning:

Blogs are different from diaries and other conventional thought-storing mediums because they are extremely custom; blogs are a way to share thoughts with anyone who would care to read one's blog. With widgets, blogs for a certain class or group are able to be linked with each other and feeds update connected bloggers with notifications of a peer's new posting. Hyperlinks, movies, picture, audio and many other multimedia functions and elements are easily incorporated into blogs with the click of a button. Nowadays, when computers are accessible to nearly every student, blogs are a great way for teachers to post assignments, reiterate topics discussed in class, and great for posting question for both students and teachers.

I have no questions about the blog section of this chapter because I am in complete support and understanding of the blog realm. This semester was the first time that I was required to blog for two of my three classes. I was very standoffish towards the idea of being required to post my thoughts online. However, as the semester is coming to an end, blogging has been pretty helpful and I am planning to do it for most of my classes to come. Not so much in this class but in my other English class blogging has helped me achieve a higher grade. Being linked to everyone in the classroom's blog, it is very simple to navigate through blogs and compare thoughts to the subjects we are discussing. For example, some students simply recollect what happened in class and create a very helpful outline by adding links and hypertext to their blogs. These links often help those who need help understanding certain concepts or stories. Also, my friend Rio posts his audio recording of the class lecture on his blog daily; If one just so happens to play hooky, they are able to easily catch up to speed by logging in their blog and listening to an audio recording through the blogs of others. As far as my other English class, I wish that we did have blogs specifically for discussion of what was happening in class. It is important to hear the thoughts of others, and it is impossible to listen to everyone's opinion in a fifty minute class. Blogs are one of the most important tools that I will be using when I teach; they are easily made interesting and are a great way of communication between students and teachers.

Chapter 11

Clarify Key Stages in an effective demonstration that guides student learning with and about technology in various subject areas:

Demonstration: Just as we are doing in our team teaching, the teacher is to demonstrate the technology and concepts while engaging student thought process. As observers, it is helpful to inquire what the students think about what is presented and how it can be adapted. This is crucial because teacher-centered lessons and tutorials often tend to create bored, distracted, and antsy students. Labs and Hands-On Activities: As the book states, constructivists believe that labs and hands on are essential if students are to successfully use technology as a tool. Keep in mind that the teacher needs to create focused and organized labs. At the end of each lab, it is very important to discuss how the students felt about using technology as a tool and what can be changed or improved. Questioning: This part is pretty self explanatory; start by asking simple questions and end with the higher-level ones. Grouping: Grouping, although I am not a huge fan of group-learning (usually one person ends up doing all the work), it is another way to teach technology as a useful tool to students. Some students often work better in groups because they have their peers to explain techniques and situations in more relatable terms. All of these strategies are useful; testing each one is the only way to figure out which method(s) are most useful for your adaptation.

I guess I really don't have any questions or qualms about this section because it is pretty straight forward. At the level I will be teaching, students are going to already know how to type and do basic word functions. These techniques are great if you are introducing a new technology; I guess I would apply them to free software or something like that which would be useful in an English classroom.

As a student, I was pretty tech-savvy; It was often me who told my English teacher how to do certain things on Word and other programs. I taught her to use the Grab program in order to take snapshots for step by step instructions, which made tricky applications of Word seemingly painless. Other than that, I don't really call learning a whole lot of new styles of technology in most of my classes.

ch 13

I choose to answer this question: Identify the usefulness of scoring rubrics when assessing student learning in technology rich ways.

Rubrics are very important when incorporating technology in your lesson plans. The rubric must score knowledge of the technology and the content material which is being enhanced by the technology. From the highest level of achievement to the lowest, the scoring guides must be stated clearly; it is best to have examples so the students can visualize the rubric. As we talked about in the class, a written plan or script for the technological material is vital when making a multimedia project. Instead of just using words such as advanced, proficient, partially proficient, and not proficient, accompany an example of how these categories reflect the work they are designated to.

During my days in High school, I can really only remember making two movies. One was for a health class and the other for an English class, which I think I have discussed in my previous blogs. My English teacher, with the use of a rubric and examples, made her grading scale very clear to us. We had to turn in a script before we could begin production and I remember everything going fairly smoothly, as we had stuck to our script. Most students need more than just a few words to describe the proficiency of their projects, and adding examples and clarity to rubrics can solve this problem and help students score higher.

The only question I have about this section is: How are we as teachers to grade those students who have great quality but poor content while using technology to gain knowledge. Is a student to fail as though they had written a poor paper in impeccable handwriting? I guess that is probably something that needs to be assessed on the rubric.