Reflection on this blog: http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/01/12-education-tech-trends-to-watch-in-2012/
This blog is about different technological areas and the advances that they expect to make in being used for education. The one that I thought will be the most prevalent is gaming. I think more and more games with educational purposes are being made and teachers really need to embrace them. Kids connect with electronics and enjoy them. I am not saying that we should do only electronic activities by any means, I think that the hands on and group activities (ex. making volcanoes, coloring pages etc.) are very important as well. I believe that with the advances our society has been making technologically that we have a lot more variety of activities possible in our everyday classroom.
To be honest, I didn't like how this article was written. I felt like the author repeated things just to make 12 different categories of "trends." Some things I felt had nothing to do with education, they were just for anyone that used technological devices (bandwidth, privacy/security). There were also a couple things that I just didn't really understand (the maker movement).
I actually felt like I learned the most from the comments below. One person commented about a free online textbook. http://goo.gl/U40c0 is the link for the "flexbook" which I found very resourceful. You can look up any grade and any subject matter and they have different options such as National Science Education Standards or the Texas Standard. (Quick interesting fact I learned the other day-Texas has a certain way it wants textbooks done, especially history, and since it is such a largely populated state a lot of publishers cater to their wants) Anyway, the flexbook was really neat because it gave you an idea of what you should be covering and it is a resource your students could use at home if they forgot their textbook at home. It had exercises you could do and it also had links to other websites that pertained to your topic of interest. I know that alot of textbooks you buy these days have their website but I thought this made a good supplemental resource. Something similar that I learned about in high school is khanacademy.org which is this guy that is absolutely brilliant who makes these videos for different subject matter, I found it especially helpful for calculus.
I didn't really understand the Maker Movement either, but I liked what was mentioned in one of the comments about 3D printers being used in the classrooms more!
ReplyDeleteI did like how this article was written. It was very simply organized by paragraph and most of the technologies seemed relevant to either students or teachers in some way. I agree that some topics were unfamiliar, but that was the point of the blog to acknowledge "up-and-coming" technologies in 2012. Im glad you mentioned the free textbooks online. I wish that was something that was more accessable for students now so that information was available in class and at home. I had a couple history classes in high school that implemented online textbooks as well as hard copies of texts, and it came it handy because we were unable to take books home.
ReplyDeleteThe main reason I disliked the article was the repetitiveness of it.
ReplyDeleteYeah crazy about the Texas thing...but I like the idea of the flexbooks as well. I hadn't thought about them in the case of a student forgetting a textbook at home, but it totally makes sense! This idea could also lend to the BYOD idea for classrooms.
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