Blog Post #3

I think that the points Kelly Hines made were legitimate. She put certain things in perspective for me. Ever since I started in EDM 310, I thought that technology was the most important thing. Ms. Hines made me realize that it is not. There are other aspects of being a teacher that come first. One of these things is making sure that what you are teaching is actually learned by the student. It does not matter what tool you use to teach if the student does not understand the concept.

Hines made another good point that while technology is a good tool, it is useless if the teacher is technologically illiterate. That is why I still believe that most teachers should be technologically literate. Technology is our future. Most people use technology everyday. This is why it is important to have technology incorporated in our schools in some way. Though I do agree with Ms. Hines, technology is not everything.

I felt as though I could relate to most of what Karl Fisch was saying. I also often struggle with the technology illiterate concept. There are so many teachers out there that are great without the use of technology. The only problem is that they might be doing their students an injustice by not incorporating technology. I only say this because technology is the future. Every one of those students will be using technology in their life at some time, if not every day.

I also really enjoyed Fisch's comparison of being technologically illiterate to actually being illiterate. It is a clever comparison. I would also agree that while he may be harsh, he has a point. At one point in time it was acceptable to be illiterate, and now it is not. Now it is acceptable to be technologically illiterate, but in the near future it will not be.

I was extremely impressed by Gary's Social Media Count. I had no idea how fast all of these media accounts were going up. After only watching this for one minute, 60 hours of YouTube video had been uploaded. That is incredible! At just two minutes 700 new Twitter accounts had been made. I had no idea Twitter was growing at such a rapid pace.

One of the counts that really amazed me was the money spent on virtual goods. It was increasing extremely fast. I do not spend very much money on the internet, so this really made me think. Also at just 4 minutes, 4,000,000 items had been shared on Facebook. I had no idea Facebook was this huge. This was an incredible tool.

A Vision of Students Today put perspective into the fact that education must progress with technology. A change must be made. As an aspiring teacher this change must come with my generation. Most teachers, in today's time, do not use technology at all as a teaching method. By doing this, an injustice is being done to those choosing the education field.

For a teacher to teach the student, one must use methods that the students use to teach themselves. This would be things such as web pages, twitter, and email. From my own experience, I feel comfortable using technology, and therefore appreciate classes where it is integrated into the lesson plans. However I do not think that students should be solely dependent on technology. This might encourage one to use technology to do all of their thinking for them.