Blog Assignment 4

Scott McLeod is an associate professor at Iowa State University in the Educational Administration program. He is also the director of CASTLE, which is the nation’s only academic center dedicated to the technology needs of school administrators. His blog post Don't teach your kids this stuff. Please? makes a great point in a really creative way. Personally, I love sarcasm. Yes, the internet and a lot of the things that come with it can be negative. However, we should not keep kids away from it just for that. There are so many things that come with it that can help them. No matter what people try to do computers and technology will be her to stay. Many of my fellow students have alluded to the idea of just using internet safety technology to keep children safe. All of that is well and good, but, as Mr. McLeod said in his comment on the EDM 310 class blog, most parents don't have the knowledge to implement those technologies. I don't have the answer to that problem, so I pose the question to everyone," How do we teach the parents to keep there children safe on the internet?"

The iSchool initiative is a great idea. The first thing that struck me about this video is that it was produced by a 17 year old high school student. He is very bright and has come up with an idea I'm quite sure would have never crossed my mind at his age. I like how he has done the research on the applications that are available today. I will probably take some time to go through my phones applications to see what may be of use to me.

I am impressed with what he has come up with, but I am not sure it is a completely possible idea. Public schools have enough trouble trying to get families to buy the supplies necessary much less a device like the iSchool. Most of the items listed in the "Ways it May Save Money" slide can be provided to the students from lower income families by the school for little or no cost to the parent. The idea that a school can just get rid of paper and copiers is, in my opinion, Utopian. When I become a teacher I would love to go completely green, but I won't because, as I've learned in my previous jobs, it is always best to have hard copies of something when a problem arises.

The Lost Generation video is amazing. The writer of that speech is an absolute genius. By being able to see the words written out in the order first written, I felt sorry for the narrators view of how their life will play out. When read back in the reverse order, It describes how I like to look at the years ahead of me. I refuse to let others tell me how my life will play out, and hope to be a part of a generation that helps change how we live on this planet. All I can say is, AMAZING!

Again I am amazed by this class! The performance of 'Lux Aurumque' is awesome. Imagine if these people took what Mr. McLeod seriously when he said don't collaborate. We would not have been able to witness that masterpiece of music and technology combined. This just shows what we as humans can now create because of our ability to work with one another without borders.

Teaching In the 21st Century poses a lot of great questions. The one that stuck out to me was the question of how do we control our students with all of these new toys. The answer they gave was simple, but profound. We control them the same way we would with a pen and paper. I wrote in our last blog post assignment that I think we should use the students cell phones as a teaching tool and I got the same reaction from the person that commented on that post that my wife gave me. They both said that students will use them to do other things instead of their school work. My argument is that they're gonna do that any way no matter if we use the phones for classroom purposes or not. If we can find a way to engage the students they may quit texting long enough to learn something.

Teaching in the 21st century means not just teaching facts. It is teaching children how to find out those facts you were going to teach them on their own. All of the information is out there for them, we just have to give them the tools to find the right information from reliable sources.