Myths, Challenges and the Future

Some of the myths that I have believed before entering an actual classroom is that since we are in a “technology” time period the students will be “experts.” I believe that this is a misconception that many people fall into. I believe that part of these misconceptions come from our previous experience. I have been told many times that when I enter the classroom many of my students will know more about technology than I do. I am in a second grade classroom this semester and we are working on a different technology class. My group an I had many different plans for these students for the semester, such as blogging, podcasts, public service announcements etc. When we first started in the classroom we hit our first road block, which was that students were not experts in technology and we had to start from the very beginning. I just think that we believe students are much more advanced than they might actually be in the real classroom.

A challenge that I have experienced in this same classroom is the time it takes to execute a project using technology. We are using blogs in the same second grade classroom that I spoke of previously and there is a lot more that goes into the process than we saved time for. The students are having a lot of issues typing and spelling on the blog, they had to make their blog, decorate it and find creative titles for their posts. It took a lot longer than we anticipated which made it harder for us to teach our lesson. We also found that it was time consuming because of all the distractions online. I think this could be taken care of in our own classroom more effectively because the students would respect us more as their teachers. Another challenge in the classroom are the websites that are blocked. When we first started this project in the second grade classroom we had about three different blogging websites that we believed would work in the classroom. We did not have an opportunity to try out any of these websites first before going into the classroom so when we tried them for the first time none of them worked. I thought we would be fine because they are educational websites such as “Edublogs,” “Edmodo” and “KidBlog.” I think this is both a myth and a challenge that we will continue facing in the classroom because we will always hit these roadblocks and have to go to plan B or plan C or plan D and so on.

The future is always fun to look into especially for my own classroom. I am frightened to think about it but super excited at the same time. In the future, I will know not to go into a classroom unprepared, I will try out websites beforehand and make sure they are not blocked. I have also learned that in the future I will not just assume my students are technology experts, I will know that we can all learn more together. As part of this class I have also learned how time consuming these projects can be, so I have learned to be patient. I see how long it has taken me to develop my Personal learning Environment and how it may take a student longer to construct an authentic assignment.

Looking at the horizon report was interesting, before this class I did not even know it existed. It is very interesting to look at the technology that will be part of my future classroom. I really enjoyed listening to all the explanations and discussion in the live session because it is always better for me to hear and see examples. I think that it is also intimidating to see some of the technology tools that will be part of our classroom because it is a lot of new information to learn. Augmented reality has to be the most intimidating but a really awesome tool. I think that this is very interesting and to me seems to be something from the future. I really look forward to the technological advances that I will see during my teaching career and how it may impact my own teaching.