Personal Reflective Paper #1

My definition of literacy is reading, writing, and speaking between two people or more. My definition of technology is anything that is created to make our lives easier. Someone once told me that technology is always changing. A long time ago a pencil could have been considered technology. So today I think some forms of technology are i-pads, i-phones, computer software programs, and interactive computer games. In the classroom some new technologies are Flip cameras, Elmo machines, and lap tops with wireless connection throughout the building.

I believe that technology has made a huge impact on communication. Today we can talk to each other so much faster than ten years ago and through so many outlets. I can communicate with colleagues and friends in seconds through my texting, Facebook page, and email. I can see how fast technology is moving in my own life. When I was in middle school we passed notes between periods. In college we emailed each other and used Instant Messenger. Now we text and update our Facebook page from our phones. This technology has impacted my communication because I’m talking to many people in different social groups in one day without using my telephone, or leaving my home. I can keep up with friends and still have time to grade papers and take care of my son.

Technology will continue to change our reading and writing practices. I believe in the next ten years schools can be paperless. I see Indiana taking away the standard 3.6.1- Write Legibly in Cursive. College students now don’t turn in anything hand written. I can see this trickling down to grade school students emailing homework assignments. I should be teaching typing skills in class. I also think that students are skimming through text instead of reading every word. There is so much to read now due to the Internet. There is so much information and not enough time to read it all. Someone I believe has to skim in order to find the information they are looking for. I believe text will have more titles and subtitles and pictures to fast forward the reading. I also believe that since anyone can publish something on the web that English grammar will suffer. The other day in class my students thought that the sentence, He and I are going to recess, sounded funny. They are reading books with poor grammar and more slang words. So this means that vocabularies will be changing even faster in my opinion. The art of language will barely exist because people will shorten their speech (for example: lol, jk, idk) and write more to the point. A teacher told me yesterday that a student wrote idk (I don’t know) on their test.

I think teachers are going to have to stay up on current technology in order to better our children’s education. If a student doesn’t know how to operate a computer or search on the web they will fall behind especially in college. So I believe that it’s vital to let students play with new technologies. Unfortunately schools don’t have to the budget to keep up and neither do some of the families. At the school I was teaching at last year we had old VHS camcorders, 30 old laptops that had to be used next to a push cart for internet access, overheads, four computers in the classroom. We are very much behind due to money. In the past teachers would purchase anything extra they needed. I cannot afford to go out and buy flips and laptops and an Elmo for my class. So I and other teachers do the best with what we have. I try to get the students to do research projects in teams to share the computer. I try to schedule my class into the computer lab when we can in order to get on the computers to type for writing. I will use my personal digital camera for students to use. Our school has a program called Odyssey which is software to help reinforce skills taught in the classroom. I try to let students use this whenever they get done with their work early. I wanted to start blogging with my students this year on my teacher webpage, but unfortunately I have three students who don’t own a computer and two more students who don’t have internet access. My student families also don’t visit the library regularly. I didn’t want to start this blogging because these students would be left out.

If the world was perfect and I had all the new technologies and all my students had permission and access to use them then they would be light years ahead. My students would be doing more projects and creating. I would like my students to be interacting with other classrooms. I would organize a classroom webpage and have the students run the webpage adding links of their projects. Instead of reading their science books for their homework, they could find videos on the internet or find a site with information. The students could come back and teach each other. They would each have a digital profile. In reading they would have all an ipad with millions of books to choose from. They would record themselves reading and hear if they are fluent readers instead of me telling them. They could also watch each other read, see book lists of other students, and discuss their books through the computer. Their interests in each other would propel them to interchange ideas and enhance their reading and writing abilities. The students would finally have a better stakehold of their education. The possibilities would be endless.

I found some similarities between myself and the teachers in the Karchmer article, The Journey Ahead. The teachers were concerned about reading level. I have run into that problem many times being an elementary teacher. This year I have five students who are reading on a 1st grade level; seven to eight students on a 2nd grade level; and the rest are on a 3rd grade level. I haven’t found tons of kid friendly websites that low readers can navigate independently. I also agree that it takes more time for the teacher. I have to do a lot of searching and navigating for internet sources that students can do on their own. In the article it said that textbooks are a better source of information compared to the internet.(page 455) I also agree to this statement. Time and management is also a struggle. I have only four computers to share between 22 students. This article did inspire me to try to be more creative with integrating technology into my classroom as I hope this class will do the same.

Works Cited
Karchmer, R.A. (2001). The Journey Ahead: Thirteen Teachers Report How the Internet Influences Literacy and Literacy Instruction in their K-12 classrooms. Reading Research Quarterly. 36(4), 422-466.