Oops!! Forgot to post Chapter 9 :-o

Chapter 9 in Rethinking Education in the age of Technology summarizes many of the themes and values from the previous chapters in the book.  It talks a lot about the effects of technology on children's lives outside of the classroom and how this influences the decisions that need to be made on techniques for teaching inside the classroom.  I found it interesting when the author was talking about how the positive effects of things such as video games, computers, and cell phones help develop skills to benefit their learning in the classroom.

  Also, it was neat to see a perspective on how these technologies also are affecting future careers and characteristics of the future workforce.  It is important that teachers begin changing curriculum to be more computer based and bringing a lot of the technology that children are now accustomed to into the classroom.  Parents also should be aware of this technological literacy gap between them and their children and they also need to take the same measures to make sure they can stay an active part of their child's life and education.  

Bloging 'bout my Blog

I really enjoyed the task of blogging this semester and found out a lot of different ways I can incorporate it into my future classroom. I feel that using this could be extremely effective with my students and could help benefit their education. Blogging is great for reflection and posting ideas.

I feel I put a lot of effort into my blog and posted a reflection for all of the tasks we completed. It was difficult at times to post multiple blogs weekly because of all the other tasks I have to complete during the school week. It was hard to decipher between the two textbooks we were reading at the same time as well. Many times I would catch myself in saving a post rather than publishing it. It was great keeping a blog and it is a great thing to look back on, to remind you of all the different things we have done and learned in the semester.

Wiki and Screencast Reflection

My Wiki revolved around the question "How can animation be integrated in an elementary classroom to benefit student learning" and I spent a lot of time researching this topic because I feel integrating different forms of animation could interest many students. Most students these days spend hours watching cartoons and playing video games, I feel that if we can bring that into the classroom students would be more interested in the material and more willing to learn. 

I enjoyed working on this wiki and felt it gave me confidence in forming my own when I become a teacher. Providing a wiki for my students and their parents/guardians will be a must in my classroom because of all the benefits it can provide, and would be a great addition to my classroom blog. It would be great to update daily and be able to allow student feedback, while having students and their guardians participate.  

I felt formulating the wiki was an excellent task, although I was a bit confused on the purpose of the screencast, because I felt i was repeating all the information I listed on my wiki.


View my Wiki and Screencast!! -
http://ktesch.wikispaces.com/Integration+of+Animation+in+Elementary+Classroom

Delicious is delicious

We have been using the social bookmarking site Delicious during this semester, and I hate to admit that I wanted Professor Boyer to be fed to sharks when he gave us this assignment because I felt it was the stupidest, most useless, and what seemed to be a complete waste of time tool. I now, of course feel extremely guilty of ever thinking that, because it has been one of the most beneficial things we have utilized this semester and feel I could even be their spokesperson.

At the beginning of  Education 331 when Dr. Boyer told us to go to Delicious.com I was was frightened I would see naked women on the page, but in reality it was the best website Boyer exposed us too. Delicious has minimized my extremely large favorites tab on my computer and allows me to have access to my favorite websites when on any computer, not just my own, and has thousand of resources available to access. Delicious also allows me to search different people who have also 'tagged' the website and view their different websites they tagged that I could find useful, allowing me to maximize my resources.

I feel that this is probably the best thing I was informed of this semester and has already used it more times than I would have ever realized. Plus I don't have to scroll through my favorites tab for 10 minutes to find the one website address anymore.

C. 10 Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology

Rethinking of education should aim toward strategies that provide access to the new educational resources for everyone in society and give people the motivation to take advantages of these resources.  (129)

Rethinking Learners discussed how instead of thinking how to improve schools, we should be asking “how can we develop games to teach history”. I felt that this is a logical statement because we are not trying to improve the school itself, a school is a building where learning takes place and we should be focusing on the education that is involved and the different ways we can push forward and offer different tools.

Questions that come up: What might happen if our thinking about learning doesn’t change? If schools cannot change fast enough to keep pace with advances in learning technologies, learning will leave schooling behind. 

It was interesting to hear the statement about school systems currently do not help students develop intrinsic motivation to learn, that there is a huge disengagement with students and the curriculum, enforced by less-than-ideal classroom experiences.  It really was not surprising to see the statistics of 50% of high school students are bored everyday in their classrooms, and 82% reporting school experiences “boring and irrelevant”

Machines for toddlers that teach reading, which I find interesting but as a future teacher I find to be horrifying, because I feel this someday could eliminate my dream job. It is interesting that students who play games, can develop an interest in the subject that may be rather boring. 

The idea has been brought up multiple times of classrooms without teachers, that students are guided by technology and Teachers can help out when students need more assistance than a computer can provide …Makes me question if I should just change my major now!

If we could find what type of game could interest everyone and have curriculum involved. It would be perfect.

It was interesting to read about the different online games that involve so many basic literacy practices, and how much they are actually utilizing. It has reinforced the idea of bringing technology into the classroom to make the learning more interesting for the students and give them the ability to learn for their future.

One of my favorite quotes has come from this chapter in this book and it states 

" Those of us who care about education should do whatever we can to see that our children are educated the best they can to live in a technology-rich society"

C. 10 What it all Means & Epiogue

What does all of this junk mean anyways?! Obviously there has been changes in the last decade with technology and it is growing more popular than ever and will be a necessity in all classrooms in the near future. There are going to be many things we as future teachers should try to incorporate into our curriculum involving technology, not only to help students be engaged in the material but to prepare them for their future.

This book taught us about many useful tools that are available to us at little or no cost and can so easily be integrated into any classroom. From wikis and blogs to help with communication between schools and home, and social book marketing to help with resources, there are many fantastic tools I will for sure be using daily and in my near future as a teacher. Connecting with people over the internet who share our same passions can help us share so many more resources than ever before.


I do have to say, a big problem with my future career and technology is going to be the endless hours. Because now with this wonderful technology my students can reach me at any hours of the day and this turns the teacher into a no longer 9-5 job ( or 8-3 )

These drastic changes have just come up in the last few years, and makes me wonder what is going to come up in the next decade, or century.

The epilogue was really inspiring on how many tools a person can use in just a few minutes and make what could have been hours of time into a mere 45 minutes.

Exit Slip 12/9/10

Last Day... YAY!

This course has taught me a lot about the importance for integrating technology into the classroom. 

There are many ways I would integrate technology in my elementary classroom and many of my ideas intertwine with each other.

I would integrate by maintaining a  classroom website that includes a daily blog with summaries, assignments and photographs of things we do in the classroom. My website would post daily assignments, resources, information about me including contact information, and our classroom schedule for parents to get up to date. This would open doors and get the community involved in what is going on behind closed doors in the classroom and in the long run, the school could gain much more support. 

This site would also include a wiki in  to be able to get feedback from my students and parents with questions and to open the communication doors. I could easily add to it daily, or hourly to have parents receive up to date information of what their child's during throughout the day. This would allow students to ask questions and for myself as a teacher to understand their level of learning.  This would eliminate the daily question of  "what did you do at school today", with the dreaded comment "Nothing" I would use many different tools online to have the students interact with the material being learned.

Interactive White boards would be a fantastic addition to my classroom to get students interacting with the lessons. I would push for many different forms of technology in my classroom and get students acclimated with using many available resources online, to get the students in charge of their own learning and explore things they want to learn about. It would be a dream for students to have a 1/1 ratio of students to laptops to eliminate the division of students with laptops and without this would give teachers many more lessons that can be done with the resources available.  A great idea would be to take virtual tours of dream field trips that the school system is unable to fund your class personally going, but it takes a few click to go thousands of miles away. Different things I could include in my classroom would be Scratch projects to have students play games while learning and formulate a game with my own lesson. Rather than using Scratch to do this there are HUGE possibilities to the many thousand resources for interactive game play.

It could be a huge benefit to get Epals for students, When I was in elementary school we had pen pals a couple dozen miles away, but students could develop relationships out of our own country.

Using podcast with material for students to review would be a great idea in any classroom, this could be used as study aids and the student can listen to them over and over again. For my classroom I would love to supply Ipods to be able for student to listen to their book while reading along with it. It would be excellent to record the student and send the parent the MP3 file for them to listen to as well.

Screencasting was a great tool we learned about and would be beneficial for students for a homework assignment. Because I want to be working with younger students, I feel that reading though an article with students and being able to point to pictures with the mouse would be an excellent visualization.

This is interesting when you view the ideas we all have in integrating technology in the classroom, it comes down to having students do most learning.

It was an interesting point where Boyer said we Do Not have to know how to create a website because wikis are easy to form where you can concentrate on content, rather than spending hours working on the layout, design and format.

This class has been one of the best classes I have taken because my opinion about integrating technology has completely changed and was revised. There has been so many new resources that have been brought to my attention. Many good ideas have come out of this class, and I feel integration of technology is one of the MOST important things I will do as a teacher to get students intrigued with the information and once again be excited about learning. Plus Professor Boyer is a fantastic Professor!

"We are preparing students for their future"