Not to date myself but I remember going to the drug store with my dad to test television picture tubes. He seemed like some techno-God being able to figure out just how to fix the horizontal or vertical hold of our beast of a television. It was its own separate piece of furniture, big enough for its own zip code yet it had a picture area small enough to be blocked by the family cat. OK, so we had a BIG cat but the greatest advance in tv's at the time was if you had color and whether or not you needed to put tinfoil on the rabbit ears to make the picture more clear. Today electronics pervade nearly every aspect of our lives and my own children insist that I do not "deserve" a Smartphone because I don't know how to effectively operate one. Meanwhile I find myself teaching in a high school with children that have never known a time without computers and cell phones and I am at best, electronically "special". I am aware that the proper term for this generation of youth is "digital native" and I am also WELL aware that I was not born on the same planet as most of my students let alone the same country. I can't help but feel as if I am a visitor to their world and they are ordering 5 course meals in electronic technology while I can barely ask where the bathroom is.
So here is the beginning of a journey, a crusade perhaps or at least hopefully me not spending 40 years wandering in the desert looking for a place to plug in my laptop computer that is probably wondering how IT got paired with ME. The objective is to become more sound in the field of technology and specifically how to best use it to help our students become successful learners.
By the way, does anyone know how to spell USB?
Hi
ReplyDeleteWhat do you mean by spelling USB?? do you mean what it stands for?? It stands for Universal Serial Bus as I know.
Yes Dana I know what USB means. It was my attempt to be humorous and to make light of the challenges I have with electronic technology. Thank you for visiting the site.
DeleteSO how is your crusade with technology going? I have learned that the only way for me to really begin to understand blogs for instance, is to check out other people's blogs. This is taking hours of being online,but for me, it is the only way that I am going to truly understand and see just how valuable blogs are. Not to mention, how to implement them in my teaching.
ReplyDeleteDonna it is indeed quite challenging and I agree with you that it is also quite time consuming. I find that there seems to be so much extraneous material on sites that I am not sure what is part of the blog and what is part of advertising. I too feel that it is something that I am just going to have to actually use more before I can say exactly how I can use a blog in the class room. I blogged rather extensively when my son was ill. I just didn't realize that that was what I was doing at the time, but to put it in a class room...well that is a whole different story.
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