Chapter 2 Reflection-Investigating With Technologies

The first thing that struck me in this chapter that I had not thought of before is researching on the web. I did not think of it as being meaningless in the ways that it talks about. It is very true, even for myself that if a teacher gives us some close-ended questions to find in a chapter that we read or on the internet we are not looking to learn but just to find the answers. I learned from this chapter that we need to follow a step by step process in order to make our research meaningful. The four steps that are included in this process are: Plan, use strategies to search the web, evaluate, and triangulate sources (page 15). This will change my teaching because I will give my students direction, I will help become effective researchers and I will help them to become intentional. I like how they talk about modeling in this chapter and how to model intentional research. Modeling is something that I will always use in my classroom and now I am learning how to model technology concepts to my students that I did not know how to do before. I also learned about different search-engines and directories. Before reading this chapter I would have told you that they were the same thing, but now I know the benefits of both and how to use them more effectively. Something that I will use for teaching and lesson planning are the social-bookmarking websites. It is such a great resource that we can use when we are teachers for finding websites that other teachers use as well as other classmates. I liked the Diggo bookmarking site that they mentioned in the chapter. I like the idea of a digital transparency that they were talking about, because something that I have issues with is remembering why I like a website so much. I think that this would be great to use for websites where I only like part of the website, like the activities or only the lesson plans. The evaluating of websites in this chapter has made a big impact on the way that I intend to teach. I have thought a lot about the dangers of using the internet in my classroom and I believe that there is a great importance in evaluation of a website. I think it is an essential to teach our students how to evaluate a website for fact and for fiction. I think that the questions and the guidelines that this chapter provides will help me teach my students the difference between a legitimate source on the web and also a illegitimate source. The section about safety and privacy also has impacted my thinking and views on teaching with technology. I have always been in support of the filtering devises for students because I think that their safety is the most important thing. I know how frustrating it can be though to search online for different things on a school computer and then not be able to find anything because of the installation of a filtering devise. I think that we as teachers should try to find that middle ground and educate our students and how to use the internet more effectively. I am still kind of confused on how you reach this though, what I mean is that we are responsible for the safety of our students in our classroom. This gives the schools and teachers a great responsibility so I guess we have to monitor our students closely and make sure they are not straying away from the intended topic and material.