The use of technology in the classroom

Almost all of the articles we've read in class talk about using technology in the classroom as an "unintelligent" mindtool. The goal of using technology as a mindtool is rooted in the constructivist philosophy of having students construct their own knowledge rather than being transmitted knowledge by a teacher. While I certainly agree that classroom technologies can be used as cognitive tools to engage students in higher level thinking skills there is another role for technology as well.

Perhaps the most successful piece of educational software ever is The Oregon Trail developed by Minnesota educators as part of the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in the late 1980s. This piece of software used in classrooms around the state and eventually the nation was designed to allow students to participate in a transcontinental adventure during the late 19th century gold rush. Perhaps the reason this software was most successful was the novel adventure story way of looking at learning rather than the traditional drill and practice software typical of the day. At the same time this was certainly using the computer as tutor and not a cognitive tool in the same sense as Inspiration, PowerPoint, websites, blogs or the other technology mindtools we have studied. Still, this successful piece of software did allow students to learn both from and with computers and provided direct knowledge as well as a chance for students to construct an understanding of life on the Oregon Trail.

I bring this example up because I feel there is a place for computer as tutor and facilitator as well as the mindtool in the sense we have discussed in class. Over twenty years later this popular program still provides a unique way to look at technology in the classroom and remains a relevant resource for students, instructors and researchers alike.

Week 2 Learning

This week we spent more time working with the Blogger software. As I was already pretty happy with my blog layout I spent some time exploring more advanced features I could implement. The two that I ended up placing on my blog, more because they demonstrate interesting technology not commonly seen on Blogger blogs than something particularly useful to this blog, were an interactive Google map and a quote of the day.

In my case I implemented a quote of the day script which simply uses an existing quote of the daya database to display a daily quote, btu in my research I also came across various QOTD scripts which allow you to implement your own quote database. The Google maps implementation was based on information I found which allowed people to include Google maps through a third party site but which I modified to allow me to access the maps directly from the Google Maps site.

Finally, I spent some more time working with Inspiration. Although I've used it in the past I'm not a regular user because I tend to create relationships between concepts in my head in much the same way and don't have any problem doing so automatically so I've seen no added benefit to writing the maps down or creating them in software, though I understand that this is not the case for everyone and such software can help some people visualize the connections between topics. One of the new features I learned about in Inspiration was the ability to embed audio clips into topics which sounds interesting so I'll be looking into that more this week.

Week One Reflections

This blog is now setup for the CI5351 class at the University of Minnesota. The main purpose of tongiht's class was to introduce up to the class and our first technology tool for educators, the blog. It's unlikely that I'll use a standalone blog such as this in the classes I currently teach. I already use the University's WebVista system for the classes and based on prior experience requiring students to look on multiple sites for information about a class generally results in confusion. I have noticed though that in the latest version of WebVista there is now support for blogging within WebVista which presents some interesting possibilities.

Based on discussions with other teachers in the past blogs are often seen as a resource used by the teacher to remind students of upcoming project deadlines, homework assignments and to provide resources and links, especially to multimedia content and other websites, which supplement learning in the classroom. While this is a good first step in the future I expect that more schools and classrooms, especially Language Arts classrooms, will take advantage of blogs created by students-for students though there are some potential data privacy landmines with students which must be navigated by school districts before this becomes commonplace. Because students entereing high school today are likely to already be familiar with reading, if not writing, blogs they are likely to be interested in sharing their thoughts and developing ideas on the blog as a sort of public journal of their journey through a class.