Technology Integration also happens to be a favorite topic of mine. Of course, in my line of instructing, it is less difficult to integrate technology into the class room environment. I have taught, and plan to teach again, Intro to Computers. Therefore, Technology Integration goes without saying. Without technology integration, there wouldn’t be a course to teach. It goes without saying.

Technology integration is paramount to learning, especially in todays class room setting. Although, I would ban all student personal devices in the class room, if it were up to me. It is difficult as it is to keep their attention without needing to compete with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.  So, ban them from being used in class. They aren’t needed.

Mosts schools now have a computer, or ChromeBook, in every classroom. Although I do not consider a ChromeBook an actual computer, per say, it is good enough, I guess. I say this from more of an IT perspective.

Now back to integration. Technology has made dramatic leaps over the last 10 years, 5 years even, and those advancements have been mostly good. Office for instance has changed drastically since Office 2003. Even to the point of document format change. It use to be that all Office suites were compatible with each other. An Office 2010 could open an Office 2003 document and vice versa, but since 2013, this has not been the case. 2003 – 2010 are vice versa but since 2013 it isn’t vice versa. 2013-1019 will open 2003 – 2019 documents, but 2003 2010 will only open 2003 – 2010. It is what it is, I guess. I know why this happened, but that is for another time.

Technology integration has become an integral part of the learning experience. It has to be. Even non-traditional students are needing this integration. More and more companies are sending their employees back to school to get educated in using technology in the work place.

More and more students are needing to be able to use not just Word. but Excel and Access. And, it is not as difficult to provide the integration as it may have once been.

Most classroom have computers. okay, that is step one of the integration. Step 2 is introduce them to the computers. Step 3 is teaching them to log in. Step 4 is helping them get familiar with the different tools they may use on a daily basis such as email, searching the internet, using Office. And no, MsPaint is not a tool of daily use. Allow the students to integrate at their own pace, especially those that are new to technology.

Bring in props or other illustrations. such as a non working computer and let them get to know the inside of the PC. Disassemble a computer in front of the class and let them put it back together, under your supervision.

There are numerous ways to integrate technology into the class room setting. Use your imagination and the the creativity flow.

Below is an interactive video regarding the empowerment of student learners. I like this video very much because it shares by feeling about standardized testing. This video describes how technology is making standardized testing obsolete. On a personal note, standardized testing was always obsolete, in my opinion. 

Empowered Learners Through Technology

This second interactive video is about how a certain engineering company is helping the military solve problems and also solving problems after natural disasters.

Problem Solving Technology

I could discuss this topic for hours on end. But I will try not to; No promises.

Before I begin, let me get this first thought off my chest; why are these speakers so boring? Oh my
goodness, I am getting drowsy just watching. The content is not the issue, the delivery is. This is the
third one in a row that I have watched and the body language and delivery is tired.

Finally! Wow! I mean WOW! Taylor Mali is heck of a speaker. I could listen to him all day and I just watched the clean one. His body language and his presentation are right on point. I was able to receive more from him in 3 minutes than I did from Dweck is 15 minutes; I just didn’t feel any passion from her about her topic.

Mali is right, teachers, good teachers are the difference in whether a child develops the correct tools or not. It starts with parents, but teachers have a huge responsibility as well. Too bad many of them are in it for the wrong reasons. We need to be accessible to the students. Not just regarding school, but about life as well. Teachers need to be approachable.

I enjoyed the videos by Mali, Mitra, and Robinson. I did not, however, like the Dweck video. She is
just boring and stale and she had no energy or excitement for her subject matter. This alone lends to
the idea of not really accepting her ideas. If a speaker, teacher, instructor has no passion for the subject, why should the student. As for Mali, I chose the clean video. It was short and to the point and he believes teachers do a lot more than just get paid to babysit, and he is absolutely right. Mitra and Robinson, I feel, believe that students can learn, whether there is a teacher presence or not. Students just need a direction, actual or insinuated. And any catalyst will do: Here is a computer. Now learn French. See you in a month. Children, kids, students are hard wired to learn from conception.

I believe that the others speakers would agree with Dweck in that a student’s mindset needs to be
changed in order for learning to happen. But this is nothing new. And it is not a difficult task, if
you, the teacher.  Also have the correct mindset. Small victories turn into bigger victories. Take a bed wetter for instance. How do you instill a positive mind set? You wake them up every 2 hours to pee. They wake up in the morning and bed is dry. You do this every day for 3 months, 6 months, etc. Eventually, the child is getting up on their own, if needed, and wallah, winning mindset. It is not impossible to change the mindset of the student, but, it might take all year to do so. A growth mindset is learned behavior. Why would it be passed on? It would be naive to think that just because you have college educated parents that their mind set would be passed down through genetics. It has to be taught just like any other skill. Kids are not born potty-trained. They are taught. So why would learning be any different.

And this is where I believe that they would disagree with Dweck. Like Mira pointed out, if children have interest, education will happen. Children are hard wired to learn. They just need nudging. Whether it be installing computers in a wall and seeing what happens or using the granny method. Kids just need a direction.

As far as Robinsons perspective, he is right. We need to change the way we are teaching. The
“Paradigm” seriously needs to change. And just not at the K-12 level either. How many kids are getting
to college and can’t even sign their own name? How many college graduates are unemployed? The paradigm
has shifted and the same way of teaching and learning isn’t working. It hasn’t worked for 30 years.
From standardized testing to liberal arts, we are pumping out graduates like it is an assembly line.
It is not working. You can see that when these fortune 500 companies hire young people straight out of
college and then groom them and train them and after a few years it becomes stale. I believe this is
because these straight out of college hires have no real world learning. All they have is what they
got from books. And without the real world learning, they lost their drive or desire.

And though I did not like the way she presented her argument, she did have some good points; Yes,
failure is and should be an opportunity to learn. Take the light bulb creator: Legend has it that
Thomas Edison was asked if he felt like a failure because it took him 1000 tries to get it right. His
reply was no, and that he learned 999 ways to do it wrong.

I have already giving one example of incorporating a growth mindset, but that was for your child and
not necessarily for students. Although, the same principle can apply.

Two examples for students to encourage mind growth:

• I would break the class up into 3 or more teams, depending on the class size and they had to come up with
  a team name. I wrote a series of 10 technology related questions on the board. I randomly selected
  from the 10 questions and, as a team, they had to research and find the best answers and the fastest
  to answer the question, each team member got that point. Each team had the opportunity to earn up to
  10 bonus points from this activity.
• I would have a box of various components that go inside the PC and hand each one of them at least one
  component and had them spend 30 minutes research that item on line by each components identifying
  marks: Serial number, model number, part number, etc. The students then had to stand up in class and
  explain to the whole class what they had found about the component.

Learning in groups encourages a growth mindset. And given a specific direction, look this up,
encourages a growth mindset.

Provide a Pathway to Success

Prenskys brain gain seems to me to be allowing the students to learn by way of technology only. To listen to the students and to think with an UP/Down mentality dealing with the students. He says we should future-cate, not pastu-cate. I did enjoy the video and he had some very good points, but I have to disagree with him on some very important issues. We need to keep reminding the students  and teaching the them about the past. We haven’t always had technology, especially the technology of today, but we cannot,  and dare not forget that people actually did survive without it. I do agree in part, that listening to what the students want to learn is important and leads to student engagement and student engagement leads to brain gain. I did find it interesting that, although the video was about brain gain, he did not mention brain gain that much in the video. I did like his idea of using technology more as an educational tool and that the students of today learn in this way. Their brains are tied to the technology. If they lose their smart phone, it is as if they have lost part of their brain. From a teaching perspective, I suppose this is good. But this is also bad. It is bad in that students cannot and should not use technology as a crutch. Say they go to the library to check out a book and the computer is down. They can still use the catalog to find it. Yes, it may take longer, but the books are still cataloged and can still be found, even without technology.

I do not think it is a good idea to just use technology to teach. Technology is still just another tool, after all.  And on the flip side, teachers should not be wary of using technology in any aspect of instruction. Again, this involves engagement. And teachers need to know how to engage.

As a non traditional student. Zhao’s presentation spoke more to my situation more than other videos have. Zhao appears to be more sensitive and be acclimating to those with creative minds. What he calls the new middle class. The people that are creative. If you are Unemployed, get creative. We need to besome creative and to teach our students and children to become creators, especially job creators. And technology can be used in this endeavor. Although he is kinda boring, I agree with him more than Prensky. Not that Prensky doesn’t have valid points, especially when dealing with students and figuring out how the student wants to learn.  And even though Prensky makes sense, I so prefer Zhao’s thought process. I suppose because I am in that similar type situation. I am in the position of having to create a situation for myself in order to be more hire-able for a particular position, in my case, using my real world learning in the class room to better myself. Which coincidently, is the subject of the text: Using digital tool and practical strategies for successful implementation. Like me, some students are having to use there real world learning in order to better themselves and make themselves invaluable.

I have created 2 mindmaps because I did not like the first one that was made, but I including it because I spent time making it. Both are on the subject of technology education or more precisely, not forgetting the past while we seek the future. 

Update: I have added more pages to Provide a Pathway to Success, and each page is linked to a video. But, unfortunately, Canva does not support this, as of yet. So, all I have is images with text. I am going to leave the images linked to videos so when the technology catches up to my presentation, then they will work or should work. No timetable on when that will happen. I also tried to link the other pages to the images on the main page, but, it appears, Canva doesn’t support this function either.  

Update 2: I was on the wrong blog. This stuff is getting confusing. This mindmap was created  using www.popplet.com. It is a little more extensive and still a work in progress, meaning that I have set ip up so that if I need to add to it or take away from it in the future, it will not change the topic. It is just that minds change as different learning happens, and I reserve the right to alter my opinion at a later date. In the mean time, welcome to my new mind map:

Brain Gain

This second presentation has some of the videos that I tried to use for the Canva presentation. It is a simple presentation that exhibits my opinion of the Prensky video. To put it plainly, I felt that Prensky was disregarding the past technology just because the students of today do not learn in the same way they did. And that we need to cater to the way students learn today and not use the technology of the past. I know first had that this is not a correct assumption to make. Just because something is old, doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from it and that students will not accept learning about the technology of the past. Quite to the contrary, I find the students to be quite enamored with the technology of the past and I strongly disagree with that mindset in the classroom and do not consider it to be Brain Gain at all. Because if you forsake the past to learn the present and future, it is not Brain Gain, it is Brain Loss.

The Past Teaches Us about the Future

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I am new to this whole blogging thing. And I have a lot of questions, well, some questions about blogging. I have written 3 blogs so far. I published the 1st one already. It was rather long. Not to be outdone by Blog 1, Blog 2 is longer and Blog 3 is even longer. I did not think I would have that much to say, but apparently, I do. My question is this: From a creative standpoint, can a blog be to long? And how long is too long? I enjoyed writing them and I hope people will enjoy reading them. Is this also taking into consideration when determining the length of a blog?