Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Blog Assignment 7

This says Symbaloo.
The Networked Student
After watching The Networked Student, I was in awe of all the technology used by the student described in the video.  He had a very advanced personal learning network that he could use to easily find information on whatever he needed.  All this technology seemed a little bit overwhelming to me.  It is hard to imagine being a teacher who just basically coaches the students into finding information on their own.  I guess that is a good way to look at teaching though.  If you can teach someone how to do something, they are set for life.  It is kind of like the difference between buying someone a meal and teaching them to cook.  Buying the meal is instant gratification while the cooking is more hard work.  However, learning to cook will help you prepare many meals in the future.

I am not sure if I am ready to be a teacher of the networked student.  As I said earlier, it seems like a great idea, but this is a completely different image of a teacher from what I had in my head.  I thought of teaching as making students understand things such as reading, comprehending, and analyzing.  I plan to be an English teacher, so it is hard for me to imagine letting my students use an advanced learning network like the one shown in the video.  Yes, the internet might be good for finding sources for papers, but with English, I think too much technology might lead to unoriginal ideas.  It would be very simple for a student to google an analysis of a story instead of interpreting it on his/her own.

Overall, I find this type of networking in the classroom a little bit scary.  I was getting a little confused when the narrator was telling all the things the student did.  I think this type of learning would be great in certain fields of study like science, but for my purposes, I just do not believe I would want to use anything this advanced.

A 7th Grader's Personal Learning Environment
After watching A 7th Grader's Personal Learning Environment, I was really inspired to make my PLN like hers.  Everything on he page was so organized and detailed.  Truly, I watched this video when I was creating my PLN.  It helped a lot to see all the cool things you can do when you have information grouped together.  I really liked how she could save certain exerts from different articles.  This would make research a lot easier than printing everything.

1 comment:

  1. "It is hard to imagine being a teacher who just basically coaches the students into finding information on their own." Why? Are you committed to the burp back method?

    "It is kind of like the difference between buying someone a meal and teaching them to cook. Buying the meal is instant gratification while the cooking is more hard work. However, learning to cook will help you prepare many meals in the future.' Correct. And isn't it better to provide a permanent skill?

    Interesting.

    ReplyDelete