technology autobiography update

Although I came to computers relatively late in life (I bought my first one (Mac G4) ten years ago when I was 28), they quickly became an integral and indispensable part of my daily life. At first, I mainly used the computer to keep up with friends and relatives via email. I then began to use them for more creative endeavors at work and at home. I would generate orders, reports, and analyze buying and selling trends with computers in my job as a buyer for a local small business. At home, I used the computer and recording software such as Digidesign Protools to record and edit my own and others musical groups.

After moving from Louisville to New York five years ago, I began to use the entire Microsoft Office suite on a Windows platform computer for the first time for work in my new job as national sales manager for a music distribution company. I used Acrobat Reader and (minimal) graphic editing software as well. Upon moving back to Louisville from New York two years ago I began working for and eventually took over a music marketing company, and continued using Excel, Word, and Entourage extensively. I am currently at the point where I couldn’t survive without them.

While on tour in Europe a few years ago with a musical group, I started a blog to document places where we played. It was nothing fancy, but it showed me how powerful a tool it could be for sharing ideas and photographs. In the past couple of years, I have jumped on the social networking bandwagon, joining and using facebook, myspace, twitter, and tumblr. Although I wouldn’t include myself in the “addict” category, I do use at least facebook pretty regularly as a way to stay in touch with my many friends that I don’t get to see much any more as I am in school.

Since being in the classroom, I have become spoiled by technology options (both classes I have been placed in have had Smartboards!) I have found these to be indispensable ways of staying organized and exposing students to engaging, interactive and fun modes of learning. I especially enjoy being able to quickly assess students using clickers, but the technology options are virtually endless when one has a Smartboard. I believe that using technology in the classroom adds a whole new level of engagement and incentive for students too. When students can be actively involved in the assignment, be it through publishing on a wiki, or being called on to come up to the Smartboard and add to the classroom discussion, active learning is increased.
Overall, I would say that I am fully “technologized” and have a very open attitude to learning new technologies for use in the classroom. I am especially excited to learn how to best use wikis and blogs for learning and teaching!

Since beginning EDTP 504 I have been exposed to a number of emerging technologies that are perfectly suited to the classroom. Blogs, wikis, podcast, digital stories, flikr, and RSS are all tools that I will certainly use in my time as a teacher. I look forward to using a classroom blog as some teachers had used bulletin boards or classroom newsletters in the past. A blog can act as a "home base" of sorts for the classroom: a place to find out what is happening and to view examples of student work. Blogs are an excellent way for students to have their work published to the world at large, and receive feedback from a number of different audiences as one would in real-world situations. It's a great way to prepare students for the collaborations and ways of working that they will inevitably encounter in the years to come.

One of the more exciting new technologies that I will using is the wiki. Its possibilities are nearly endless. Students can use them as places to collaborate on group activities such as writing, science labs or social studies projects. One great thing about a wiki is that you can track each student's contributions for the purpose of assessing. Another great thing about the wiki is that it is a great way to encourage peer scaffolding and vicarious learning - students see how other students are solving the problems of the assignment and are more likely to use similar strategies.

The podcast and digital story are two other great ways for students to use technology in the classroom. Nearly anything that can be reported on, from math to science to writing, to social studies, can be done so in these forums. I love the idea of having students use podcasts as a weather report during a science unit on weather. I love the idea of using a digital story or flikr to report on an inquiry based science activity such as dissecting fruit or other objects to describe properties. In this way, the digital story or flikr tells the story of the project in pictures. With flikr, the students are able to "tag" and describe the photographs and with a digital story, the students are able to describe the project using their own voice. Either way, the process of creating the flikr or digital story becomes a crucial part of the assignment, from creating a story board, to sequencing the images, to tagging and describing the images. Working in this way with other students becomes an invaluable exercise in cooperation that is analogous to real-world situations.

Another excellent emerging technology that I learned about is RSS. Since beginning EDTP 504, the way that I look for and receive information on the web has changed. I have been using RSS to receive information about my interests (music, politics, friends blogs) and about school-related topics in a funneled manner. It has been great to have RSS do the work of collecting this information for me since, as a teacher, time is at quite a premium.

Technology will no doubt continue to revolutionize the teaching profession in the years to come and I look forward to being a part of it. The aforementioned tools are likely just the tip of the iceberg of the read,write, collaborate web. It is an exciting time to be a teacher, and I look forward to taking advantage of these tools in the classroom, as they are invaluable to preparing students for 21st century living. Ultimately, using these emerging technologies in the classroom is a social justice issue: if we don't prepare our students for using these tools, life in the 21st century will be overwhelming. We owe it to every student to equip him or her with the tools necessary to thrive in the world, and technology will only become an increasingly bigger part of that equation.

Choose Your Tool

Dear Dr. Hensley,

I have been rejuvenated with fresh and exciting new ways to use technology as a result of my involvement in a Teaching With Technology course at the University of Louisville. In the class I have been exposed to many interesting and engaging ways to use emerging technology in the classroom. What I have found through using some of these tools is that students are highly motivated to work with technology and as a result end up learning much more of the content contained in lessons that incorporate technology. This is great news given how important technology literacy will continue to be as the 21st century moves on.

Recently I have been using a new web-based tool that I predict will change the way that many teachers think about teaching and many students think about learning. It is called Webquest, and it is essentially a safe environment (not open to student browsing of unintended websites) where a teacher can post an entire assignment or project online so that students can use it and refer to it at their own rate of learning. It is set up so that the student is taken through a lesson step by step so that there is no confusion as to what is expected of the student and what the exact directions are. The student can go back to parts of the lesson or directions as often as he/she sees fit to clarify confusions.

With Webquest, the teacher can provide an assignment overview, step-by-step directions, a rubric, links inside the lesson for students to use in researching a subject area, how the assignment is to be carried out, and a rationale for doing the assignment. As simple as this might sound, it could save teachers hours during a given work week which could be used to work with struggling students in small groups and individually as necessary. Everything that an elementary teacher might need to implement an engaging lesson can be assembled and made available through a Webquest, and I find this a very exciting proposition. Naturally, addressing the diverse learning needs and learning styles of students is easily met through using this fantastic tool.

Another great facet of Webquest is how easily it lends itself to teacher collaboration. One section of the Webquest is for teachers to explain their rationale for the lesson, core content addressed, and how/why it was developed. It would be so simple for a teacher to create a Webquest on a subject of his/her expertise and send it, for example, to a new teacher who is struggling with that subject to use with his/her students. The possibilities for collaboration and improving instruction in this way are virtually endless.

I think you will enjoy what Webquest has to offer your teachers. Give it a test spin at the following site (http://questgarden.com/46/54/6/070210123705/t-index.htm) and let me know what you think. I’m sure you will quickly think of many valuable applications for this tool, and will be recommending it to your teachers in short order.

Thanks much, Kevin Coultas

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

p. 130 – “(the massive amounts of information available on the web) requires that we teach our students to become more active consumers of that information instead of just passively accepting it as legitimate.”

If higher education programs are serious about equipping student teachers with the tools necessary to teach students in the 21st century, they are going to have to provide more than one 2 credit hour course in technology. We wouldn’t presume that a student teacher already understood best practice methods for teaching science, so why would we do the same for technology. This is too important an issue to gloss over. (sorry for the rant)

p. 132 – “ the Read/Write Web makes it easy for students to produce work in truly collaborative ways for large audiences. That work can have real purpose and real meaning for the audience that reads and consumes it.”

This is in keeping with what we’ve learned about the value of an assignment in general in the MAT program – it’s most effective if it reflects a real-world situation. This also acts as a motivating factory. I think anything less is a type of busy-work for students. If school is really to get students ready for life, we need to take this very seriously.


p. 133 – “our students are learning that their voices matter, that people are listening and responding, and that their ideas count. To not embrace those feelings by continuing to look at curriculum-as-lecture is to fight against a tide that we will not be able to keep back.”

Naturally, when a student’s voice matters, it acts as a great motivating factor, but it also is a foreshadow to how our democratic society works. If a student comes to understand that they really do have a say in the world, they are likely to take advantage of that situation in their life, rather than simply be a passive “member” of society. These are all civil right’s issues that we as teachers must deal with in a responsible manner.


p. 135 – “students can display mastery in countless ways that involve the creation of digital content for large audiences.”

I’m not one who is nostalgic for the days of cursive in the classroom being a big priority: the reality is that we don’t need it anymore. Most people use computers to do most of the communicating of ideas in their jobs now. Cursive, and ina way, handwriting in general, have become obsolete. Likewise, modes of communication have moved to the forefront in ways that have not been appropriately addressed by curriculum creators of school districts. It is no longer the case that we only communicate through writing and speech. There are many ways that professionals in the world use non-traditional means to communicate in their jobs. It would be wise to acknowledge this and prepare our students for this reality.

p. 135 – “Big Shift #10: Contribution, Not Completion, as the Ultimate Goal”

I wonder, with the emphasis on accountability and district control in our current education climate if this can become a reality. My hope is that it will, but it seems unlikely given how much control would be relinquished to the student (and to a lesser degree the teacher) in achieving this end. We shall see how much longer NCLB and similar outdated policies will stay in place. Something has to give in my opinion.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

p. 87 – “(Twitter is) a pretty amazing, and potentially addicting, tool once you get into it. (That addicting part is why I also follow “InnerTwitter” at innertwitter.com”

I was intrigued, knowing a little about Twitter, so I checking out InnerTwotter, and it was kind of a zen-like version of Twitter that deals only with what is right in front of you. A great idea for sure – we’re waaaaay to inundated with information for sure, but isn’t this yet another addiction? I’m not sure, but either way I like it!

p. 88 – “Paul Allison of the East Bronx Academy of the Future has created a site called YouthTwitter.com where students are posting their 140-character updates in a permission-only environment.”

I like this, particularly for my future elementary school students, and also for JCPS in general who likely have a “no Twitter” policy.

p. 90 – “users of social bookmarking systems have created a new concept to deal with the change: The process is no longer taxonomy but “foksonomy.” The idea is that in working with your community of researchers, new tagging systems will emerge and become accepted that will allow us to participate in the process.”

This gives me great hope for the future of information and the responsible use of it on the Internet. This should be taught in school (and I will) because it is one road to a truly democratic society where all of the valuable information will be easily available to all. This is a civil right in my opinion.


p. 93 – “If we use (diigo stickynotes) with the groups function, just the two of us will be the only ones to see the highlights and sticky notes. That is very, very cool, I think, and makes Diigo a tool every teacher should experiment with.”

This has huge implications for utilizing Diigo with students to provide feedback on a web-based program. One-on-one conferenceing in the virtual world!

p. 94 – “the Diigo annotations page collects all of the feedback that’s been left on student work from across the individual blog posts, allowing them to get a useful view over time of how their writing is evolving.”

If this isn’t the future of how blog writing 101 portfolios will be created and graded, I don’t know what is. It seems like a much more streamlined way to keep a portfolio as well!