Parents and Technology

In today's society, technology plays a very important role in our everyday lives. Today's 3, 4, and 5 year olds parents probably have more experience using technology more so than my parents had. So how can you help parents that may not be technologically inclined learn about technology?


In one of Dr. Perry's articles, he gives the example of children playing card games with their parent. This is a great chance to promote family involvement, but it can also be a great way to get parents and children involved together with technology.


A good way to help parents with technology is to have useful tools for them. When you have your Open House or a Parent-Teacher night, it would be helpful if you gave them a tutorial about the different things they could do on their computer with their children. Having a printed out step-by-step guide for them to take home is also helpful. Because sometimes, what you learn in class, you forget once you get home. Like most all of us know.


Another thing parents need to be aware of are the softwares available for monitoring children's activity on the computer, as well as software that can prevent sites that aren't appropriate for your children to see to be blocked. Giving your parents a tutorial about that is also important.

Technology for the Little Ones

Technology in the classroom has become very useful, but how can younger kids between the ages of 3 and 5 use it? Since most children that age can't read a portaportal wouldn't be useful unless an adult was there to guide then from site to site. So, how do you integrate technology into their learning?

Dr. Perry also answered questions about how to incorporate technology in the classroom for younger children. Video cameras and tape recorders in the classroom can be very positive and mind-expanding for young child... but like the previous blog they must be done at the right time. Technology should be used to enhance the curriculum and give children meaningful experiences. Say you were doing role playing in your preschool classroom and you wanted everyone in the class to be involved, you could show them a video of a news cast and then have each students play a different role from a hypothetical situation. Say a building is on fire and they need someone to put it out, a couple of children could pretend like they are stuck in the house while others could be the firefighters. Then the news crew could arrive, one child could pretend to interview the other using a tape recorder while another student films with a video camera. Then you could have news anchors that tells the rest of the class what happened. Children need real life experiences, and in this case technology would be great.

Is technology always good?

I have learned a lot about technology this semester, and I have been wondering whether or not technology is always good? I know too much of anything isn't always a good thing, but technology is one of those things that could go either way. So I did a little research and these are some things I found.

Dr. Bruce Perry is an internationally recognized authority on brain development and has done much research on technology with early childhood. He says that developing children require the right combination of modern technologies at the right time during development in order to develop optimally.

A lot of modern technology is powerful because it is visually appealing. Many children spend countless hours in front of the tv each day, but just because it is technology doesn't mean it's good. TV is very passive and doesn't provide children with the amount of emotional, social, cognitive, or physical experiences they need when they are young. Children need social interaction and tv can pose a problem with that social interaction.

Video games. These can be both good and bad things. When I was younger, I used to play video games like Super Mario, Mario Kart and other games of that nature. I would play for hours with my siblings and I think I turned out okay. Children that play video games with other children gain more social interaction than children who play alone. But, gaming systems have changed and now they have things like the Wii and Kinect that not only promote activity, but they promote physical activity. That is a good thing. Playing video games for hours on end by themselves is not a good thing though.

Using any sort of technology should be done in moderation and should also be monitored by an adult depending on the child's age.

Digital Storytelling Project

The Digital Storytelling Project is something that has already helped me with Education. I did mine on Animals, and I am also doing a unit for another class on animals so I've been able to use my own video for my unit plan. Any video like this is easy to make and can be used in the classroom as a set, review, or even a lesson. It can help improve student's learning because it is more engaging than hearing a teacher talk about whatever the video is about. The traditional method of just reading out of a book or talking is no longer as effective as it once was because kids now are used to incorporating technology with things, so traditional education has become more boring to them.

The actual project was really easy to figure out, but after I had finished the whole thing and tried to put in my background music, my computer froze and I lost everything. I redid the whole project only to find my original after I was done. I was a little frustrated at first, but hey I learned all of the information on each image really well!

Classroom Webpage

Okay, I don't know if it's just me or what, but I have been absolutely stressing myself out over this Webpage. I have a mental image of exactly how I want it to look, but for the life of me can not get it to look like that. I know that when I become a teacher it will be absolutely necessary for me to have a website for parents and students to have access to, but I'm having a hard time. I feel such a sense of accomplishment though whenever I figure something out. Maybe by this time tomorrow I will have figured out more!

Learning to Change - Changing to Learn

This video was so eye-opening, and after watching it it really made things I'd never thought of before seem so obvious. I get frustrated about how low Tennessee is on the list for Education in the U.S., but it's not just Tennessee, it's America. Not that our children are learning nothing, but are children aren't learning the things they will need to be successful in life (technology). I know that not all school systems can afford to have technology in their class, but we need to do something about that!

Portaportal

Voila!! I think that this will be one of the most useful things for helping me organize useful teaching websites that I find. When I find websites that I like I usually just copy and paste them into a Word document on my computer at home, but when I'm not at home that Word document full of links isn't very useful anymore. It will be nice to be on any computer anywhere and be able to sign into my portaportal to get to the websites that I want to look at.

I think this project will be very beneficial to my classroom and myself. I've looked around on various local schools' websites and have found that there are some teachers that have their own portaportals listed on their class page for their students. I imagine my portaportal being very beneficial when I have a student that goes home and has maybe forgotten exactly how to do the math that we did in class. By having helpful links for what we're doing in math class on my portaportal, my student will be able to practice and refresh their memory so they aren't worried about coming to school the next day not knowing. The traditional method of just saving links to a document or on your bookmark toolbar is not as easy to access as a portaportal.