What teachers know about subject matter, pedagogy and technology must be interconnected in today's school settings. Unfortunately for most students, this ingegration does not happen in the classroom. I was not shocked at the findings of the survey, "Technology Counts '99: Building the Digital Curriculum." The results showed that only 29% of the teachers who participated stated that they had more than five hours of technology integration training in their schools within the past year.
Personally, I have not had even one hour of this type of training since I began teaching in my district (7 years ago). The anxiety that I feel because of this lack of support and instruction as a graduate student is overwhelming at times. I am so incredibly far behind my peers in my understanding of technology. I often feel in class that I am swimming just below the surface of the water, fighting to take a breath but completely unaware of what I must do to get to the surface. Part of me feels as if I should be taking on more personal responsibility for learning technologies so that my students aren't left behind. Most of me, however, is completely overwhelmed at the idea of trying to navigate through technologies such as hypertext or StorySpace.
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I am anxious to look at the language club websites. We run an afterschool program at our school and we are always looking for ways to offer enrichment in affordable ways. Subscribing to one of the programs and taking a group of children to the computer lab with one of the care giver sounds like an incredible way to expose kids to a new language and culture.
ReplyDeleteI think it's great that you feel that the sites have great potential to improve the kids' learning experience.
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