Friday, February 16, 2007

Which strategies are most effective for teaching and learning with technology?

When learning and teaching technology it is important to be patient and to never be condescending. It is important when teaching and learning with technology to be creative. There are so many ways to integrate technology into the classroom because it is so diverse. One of the questions I have for strategies that are most effective is how to keep up with all the changing technologies when it is hard enough to keep up with the changes in your content area?

How can you effectively integrate technology into your teaching and learning?

This is a subject we have covered in both our classes so far. Intregrating technology can be done in many ways. We did an activity in class with the Inspiration program where we diagrammed all of the ways to overcome student diviersity with technology. One of the most helpful things we did was our group presentations. We dicussed how to integrate wikis, google earth, smartboards, and podcasts. You can effectively integrate any of these into the classroom. Wikis can be a class website, google earth can be used for applying subjects to real life, smartboards are interactive, and podcasts can be used to teach almost any subject and have it cast to the world.

Why might it be important for students to learn with technology?

This is one of the questions I had myself coming into the class. Myself as a student, I have never really been interested in technology in the classroom. However, I do understand why we have to integrate it into the classroom. Every student is different. Every student possesses different intelliegences. Technology is a great way to integrate all or most of the intelliegences into a lesson. In class we covered many different ways to integrate technology in the classroom. We made a "web" on the Inspiration program of different student disabilities or differences and ways to overcome them with technology. One question I would like to see answered before the semester is over is how do we overcome the problem of no 1:1 laptop ratio in highschools in terms of still integrating technology in the classroom often.