Technology in Education

Twitter Post 1: 

When doing twitter posts for technology in education 209, I learn more about teacher things that are happening in real life. Although we learn a lot through this class about the different technologies that are available for use, there are also other things, such as dealing with technology in the classroom. The issue of technology use in the classroom has become issue that has been brought up more and more through recent years. Technology can be an easier source of learning that can also be used to bond the different generations, but it can also become a large distraction. I have been seeing, liking, and retweeting posts about the differences in the ways to deal with technology. First, there is the issue of cell phones in the classroom. Should they ever be used for an educational purpose? This is the large debate. Some people believe that they should not be used in the classroom, because there are some students who don't have as nice of phones than the other students, and then they could also be a large distraction coming from them. Some people believe that they could be used as a learning tool because children are already used to using them in their daily life, so they would connect their daily life tasks. There are also people in the middle that enjoyed using them for some activities but then having the children put them back into a pocketed holder so that they were not distracted throughout the day when they were trying to learn. I also have found people that have posted their technology tips for teacher use. These are things like chrome extensions, zoom tools, and power point ideas. Tips like these will help me prepare for many things in the future when I am teaching, so that I am able to teach to my best potential, using different resources that I may not have known about in the past. Through Twitter I have also been able to hear some of teachers different opinions on issues that go on such as assigning too much homework. There is also the issue of online learning this year with all of the different things that are going on with the pandemic and many teachers are trying to help parents, as well as students and other teachers, with going about online learning. There have been many tips and tricks that I have learned to keep students engaged in what they are learning even though they are not able to directly interact with the information like they usually can. Although I have not yet done a twitter chat myself, I think back to the one that we experimented with in class. This allowed me to learn about how the twitter chats work. This also helped me learn more about my classmates and what each person is majoring in. This allowed me to follow my fellow peers and be able to engage with them, when being on twitter. I have shared some of my important views as well as some of the projects that I have been working on with twitter. I specifically shared a link to my green screen video even though I was very hesitant to do this. It was my first time trying to do a green screen video and I was not sure how well it went, but I enjoyed showing off some of my new things that I was learning through technology in education 209. I will continue to share some of the new things that I am learning, including the many different applications and programs that we are learning. This will help me remember all of the tools that I have learned, so that I can look back in the future to see all of the technologies I know how to use.

SRS Reflection

Poll Everywhere was one of the systems presented. The good things about this system is that it was easy to use and I liked that you get answers in real time. That is a very good feature to be using when doing opinionated questions. As a student it was very easy to join and easy to select the answers. Its weaknesses are that it may not be as easy to join as other things because you may have to enter in a link rather than entering in a code. Nearpod is another system presented. Nearpod is strong because of the different things that it can do such as being able to draw on slides because this allows for it to be more of an expressive thing rather than the standard multiple choice questions. It also allows for informational slides as well as the question and interactive slides. Nearpod is also bad because there are so many features that it may take awhile to explain how to do something and it took me a little bit to figure out how to do some things such as the drawing aspect. Socrative was the final system presented that I will evaluate. Socrative has many different features and I have used it as a student many times and it is definitely one of the best software I have used. They can be took as quizzes, space race, or an exit ticket. The space race is so fun because then the class could divide into even teams and try and race each other to get the answers right. I personally don't see many issues with Socrative.

Twitter Post 2

When continuing to do twitter posts for technology in education 209, it allowed me to see what my classmates were creating and thinking. I learned a lot about the professional things to do in many tweets through the many different resources they were using. There are many things going on twitter through the educational side with the online learning that is going on throughout the pandemic. There are many different ways to go about online learning and through twitter I learned many different tips and tricks to help make online learning easier for all of the students in my class. I can do this by staying organized myself. If I am at all unorganized, this will not help my students when they are trying to learn. If there are always organized plans and backups to the technical issues that may come about with online learning, this will be the best learning environment. There is also a good learning environment when there is the most interaction as possible. In-person classes makes it easier to tell if a student is struggling when roaming around the classroom, but in online learning, sometimes it is hard for students to speak up. This is why there should be checkpoints throughout the lesson to make sure that the student is understanding the material. I have learned a lot through the class and through Twitter learning from other educators. My favorite thing that I retweeted for this Twitter post was the picture that shows "some disabilities look like this" and "some look like this" showing a normal person. This was very influential to me because as a special education major, I want the rest of the educational world to know that just because there is not something physically wrong with an individual, does not mean that they do not have a disability. I myself struggle with ADHD, so it needs to be normalized for a student who has a disability that is not visible. If you met me you may not know that I have slow processing speeds and struggle with reading comprehension because of my ADHD, based off my appearance. You may be able to slightly tell because of my personality, but there should be no shame for me using disability services. I also tweeted about sharing my digital story which was a little out of my comfort zone for me. My digital story is something very personal about my life that happened that I don't like talking much about. I decided to share it with the class because it was a vivid storyline and showed a part of my life that may have changed me. Twitter allows me to express my ideas as well as learning from other people and their ideas may help me as a future educator.