Blogging Over Journaling?

So I thought I would use my post tonight to pose a kind of question. More rhetorical than actually needing an answer. Why is blogging more freeing than journaling for a class setting? I would almost feel that students would have an equal amount of sharing their opinions on both as the amount of freedom usually comes from whether or not a peer or instructor is going to read what they are writing. Is it more that blogging is easier because it's computerized?

Results of Asking My Students

I have two English 191 students who hail from China and one of them made some very interesting points about technology in the classroom. She wrote that in her country, teachers don't really use computers that often and she feels that technology doesn't really help her to learn more in class. She feels that the main purpose for teachers using computers in the classroom is to save them time for their private lives. So instead of the professor watching videos at home and collecting information to then lecture to the students, they can just show the video and let the students figure it out themselves or through discussion.

While through our class readings we have learned that the students are the major facilitators of the learning, this student feels that the technology is merely to make the instructors life easier. As much as many of us feel that we are making our classes student based - do they really understand why?

I also have a sixteen year old high school student who feels that teaching is essentially unchanged, but that technology just heightens the quality and availability of teaching.

I had quite a range of answers - from students who wish professors would just save time and email the students the powerpoints, to students who wish we still wrote every single point we make on blackboards with chalk because it slows the professor down. This range of answers makes the idea of what to teach and how to teach it difficult to answer.

Teaching Ourselves Right Out of Our Jobs

I am starting to wonder a lot lately about what future professors are supposed to be like. We are constantly told to change with the times, and we feel pressured to learn how to use technology to enhance our classrooms - both are things that I support. But the more I think, the more I wonder, will we eventually teach technology so much that we work ourselves right out of the university. If the future student is someone that can do all of their work through online classrooms, will the number of professors dwindle to just those that manage the online courses? Will physical universities become extinct?

For another class we read an article about students with hyper attention rather then deep attention skills that make up these new millenial students, and if we are constantly teaching to keep up with these students our classrooms will continue to become more and more technologized (if that is a real word). Shouldn't we concern ourselves with teaching deep attention skills to these students who would rather be going to school on their Blackberries?

Asking Questions

In my first semester of teaching, I made a lot of assumptions about the interests of my students. I assumed that they were all interested in media and planned many class activities and assignments around media and media influence, only to find that the students weren't interested. Many of my students didn't watch television, which I understand when I think about my own habits as a 'millenial.' They thought that because they didn't sit down in front of the television that they weren't influenced by media. But media's influence is upon them even on their computer screens. Ads can bombard you on Facebook and Gmail - there is no escape.

This semester, I'm asking my students some questions before I make too many assumptions. In class we will be discussing how they feel about technology in the classroom and in their own lives, and hopefully this will help me grasp their attitudes. Even though I am only 5 years older than my freshman, they are still in a different subsect of society and have different opinions.

Teachnology

So, it may seem like I am a procrastinator by doing both of my posts on Monday afternoon/evening - which is partially true. But my personal laptop is broken and I have very limited computer access, so I'm asking for a little forgiveness.

The idea of creating a teachnology statement frightens me a little. I basically feel like I have nothing to say, so I thought I would start with how I use technology in my classroom right now. I don't necessarily feel that I use it for entertainment purposes, maybe on rare occasions. But I do use it to help my students make connections. I feel sometimes that the material I am given to teach with limits me, and is hard for my students to connect to. So...instead of giving them a rhetorical analysis assignment on a boring essay that they don't care about, we work on a lot of the same skills with visual analysis and analyzing ads and ad campaigns. Technology backs me up. I have the freedom to put ads on the projector where everyone can see, to pull up websites with examples, to bring up YouTube videos of commercials for my students to discuss. Technology makes my life as an instructor easier and it also enhances my basic class planning. I'm also going to be using technology this semester as a way for my students to peer review - they will be doing online peer review through D2L which will hopefully give them a voice of constructive criticism, rather than being too nice when looking someone in the face.

I don't necessarily feel that I have an overall technology 'statement' but I do believe that to work with today's students we need to help them learn in their own language.

Blog Posting

This is my second experience blogging - my first was last semester in Dr. Barton's Teaching Composition class. When I first learned about blogging for that class I was disappointed - while I sometimes feel that I'm up with technology, I mostly feel lost. Plus, I thought blogs were kind of cheesy. But once I started, I really enjoyed it. It was slow going at first, but then I moved away from classwork and wrote about personal things, and I really got to like it as an expressive form of communication. Which really makes me think about how useful it could be for a classroom setting...my only issue being the same one that I have with journals - personal information. I feel that sometimes students can get too personal, and while I would love to help them with my history of being an RA in my undergrad, I know that as a college instructor we can't get too involved. The issue then is that one has to restrict a little of what students can blog about, maybe restricting them to just classroom readings - hopefully they will feel free to be open.