Assignment 1: Technology Literacy Project

I read Cybersaftey in the Classroom by Kevin Butler.

The article reflects on how teachers are now needing and being expected to have their students use the internet and be natives of this digital time, but how teachers must also teach how to safely use these resources. And how that is so much easier than it sounds. Many districts may want to teach students about proper and ethical use of the internet, but don't press the issue or don't prepare the teachers well enough to actually educate students about how to use the internet safely. It's a bigger deal that some might realize.

Our schools want us, teachers, to educate students in everything--including how to be safe and ethical users of the internet--and all that that entails. We cannot expect our students to simply know how to navigate the internet properly or how to protect themselves on networking sites. We have teach this as well.

The article provided some helpful sites for educating both the teacher and the student. It talks about Ning and how this can be used to help students network, but also teach them to use the networking safely.

I think that I am totally overwhelmed by the amount of information that I need to teach! But there are so many resources out there that could be extremely useful, if I knew where to access them. I think that one of their resources, CyberSmart, could be really helpful in knowing how, when, what, and where to integrate internet safety into any curriculum. NetSmartz also sounds and looks like it could be useful, but more on the student side. I think that with resources like these, I can handle integrating safe use of technology with other curricula.

Student NETs:

3. Research and Information Fluency

Students apply digital tools to gather, evaluate, and use information.

This is an important standard because it is basic to almost all internet usage. We need to know how to use the right words to search for something and we need to be able to evaluate whether or not a sources is credible. We need also to be able to use what information we find and interpret it and put into our own words and us this to transfer the knowledge onto something else. It doesn't matter if the information we are looking for is a person on a social networking site or historical facts for a research paper, we still need to be able to find it, evaluate it, and do something with it.

This standard could be met by having the students research and write a paper, in any subject, from their findings. This could also be met by having the students review sites, not to gather facts, but simply to be evaluating the site and gathering information to know if it might be useful in the future.

(1. Standard research paper or 2. website review)

Teacher NETs

3. Model Digital-Age Work and Learning

Teachers exhibit knowledge, skills, and work processes representative of an innovative professional in a global and digital society.

It is important for the teacher to know how to use the tools that s/he is expecting the students to be able to use effectively. Teachers need to be able to sue technology, from interactive boards to a project to the internet, fluidly so that the students can learn the content material and not get distracted or lose time because of a glitch, or a series of glitches. The teacher needs to be able to teach with what s/he's got in order to communicate effectively. It is also important for the teacher to keep learning. Technology changes so rapidly that even our students cannot always keep up, let alone the teachers! We need to be able to help our students learn about technology and how to gain from it and how to develop their own critical opinions about what they find (Student NET 3).

1) A lot of this has to be done while in the classroom, with actual students to accommodate for, however, I can increase my knowledge base from which to work off of. I have enjoyed finding new websites that incorporate different technological uses into the classroom. Sites like TeacherTube and Edublogs and Delicious make doing this so much easier than I ever imagined it could be. (Expand online database.)

2) Become more efficient with the technology already in the classroom. I need to be more familiar with the interactive white board and how to incorporate them into lessons in a variety of ways. I feel like there is a plethora of options here that I could do yet I don't know how to. (Gain knowledge of in class technology.)

3) Learn how others are incorporating technology. I think that there is so much we could be learning from one another if we would be willing to share or to admit that we don't know it all. I think that (if I had the time!) to go into classrooms and see how other teachers were using their materials, technology, internet, etc, I would gain so much more valuable knowledge than simply researching on my own over the internet. I think that personal experience is so much more beneficial than mere knowledge. (See what other teachers are doing)