Teacher of the Future

Technology is certainly advancing at a rapid rate. I just purchased a new cell phone today- an LG Ally with Android technology- and the little bugger does more stuff than I could even imagine possible for a little phone. As an educator, technology is going to have a huge impact on my classroom, and as it continues to evolve, so will the capabilities of a classroom and the roles of the teacher. While I do not believe a human being-form teacher will ever become obsolete, how that teacher teaches will certainly change.

I think one of the biggest changes in school will be the way students read and the way schools distribute books. I can definitely see somewhere in the (not so) distant future, a time when students will all have some form of e-reader assigned to them at the beginning of their education, and each year that reader will be loaded with all the textbooks, novels and other pieces of reading they will need for that entire school year. Then the next year, the reader will be loaded with new materials for that year, and so on. As an English teacher, this type of technology will play a huge role in my classroom and it will be something I would have to know very well in order for it to be used productively by students and myself. I think this type of technology has huge advantages, like saving money and trees, and all students will have access to an "unabused" copy of the text they're reading. I recall some extremely battered textbooks and novels that we assigned to me during my years of school, and I do believe that can hinder a students ability to learn. If a textbook has been doodle in, dropped in mud or otherwise defaced, its going to negatively impact where a clean and legible book would positively impact. So this will definitely be a benefit to students, when this technology becomes more widely accessible.

Another technological advancement that will impact my classroom is the evolution of digital cameras and recorders, As I hope to incorporate journalism in my classroom, these types of technologies will certainly be present and my students will be using them frequently for assignments. Every year, it seems, cameras and recorders become capable of more and more things, and I'm sure this advancement has not reached its end. I believe we will be seeing more cameras like the Flip coming out, that allow easy shooting, easy downloading and easy editing. These types of cameras will be able to hold more video, and probably do more in the realm of video shooting, rather than just point, shoot, and zoom. This will certainly change the scope of what I can do with this technologies and how I will incorporate them in my room. My students will be able to create more complex looking videos, but the technologies to do so will be much simpler, I imagine. They will get professional quality videos out of a simple camera and editing system, which will allow them to really develop as a one-man band, as they call it in the journalism world. They will no longer have to rely on a crew of people to put together a news package, but will be able to do every aspect of the process themselves. Being able to teach my students to use this type of technology will be a huge job and a very crucial role.

When the television was being developed, and when recorder materials became available in classrooms, people foresaw a day when a living, breathing human presence would no longer be necessary in a classroom. Those days are well behind us, and teachers are still the vital asset to all classrooms. We have advanced so much further than VHS tapes since that time, and it is obvious that we are nowhere near done with this progress. So if we have not yet outgrown the need for teachers, I don't think such a day will every come. There will also be teachers in classrooms, teaching history and English and math, along with all the technologies that will come out along the way. But have that one-on-one, personal connection will be necessary. Even if we some day live in a world where all students do their learning in e-classrooms and no actual school buildings actually exist. Even then, there will be a person, a teacher, on the other side of that computer, facilitating the learning of each student.

My Dream Classroom

If I had the opportunity to make a wish list of audio and video equipment for my classroom, I think I would begin by requesting several computers with internet capability. I would like to have 3 or 4 computers for student access and then one for myself. Having this equipment will allow my students to access video and audio online, with the primary target being news agencies websites, for students to watch video news packages and listen to streaming radio programs. I would also use my own computer for similar audio and video uses, projecting my computer screen onto the a SmartBoard for the class as a whole to view. Therefore, I would also need a projector and SmartBoard for this to be possible. I would also request a television and a combination VCR and DVD player so I can play an VHS or DVD newscasts that I need to show my students, as well as films and other education videos that I will incorporate into my lessons. A CD player would also be a nice addition, but I would not see as much need for this in my classroom and if I found I needed to play a CD at some point, I could do so on one of the computers. One of the biggest video technologies I would request for my classroom would be a camcorder (or more!) and digital video editing software. Teaching a journalism class or incorporating journalism into my classroom will definitely merit a use for this technology because I will create lessons requiring the students to make video news packages. My students will need to be able to film their own videos and then have the software available to edit these videos into journalistic news stories. If I have several cameras available for the students to use, that would be idle. Having digital cameras so students can also take still pictures for print stories would also be on my wish list for my classroom.

I Love Educational Technology- NOT!

My educational technology struggles have been within the context of this week's main software focus: Microsoft Publisher. I had exactly zero seconds of experiences with this program when we were assigned a newsletter during our Technology Basics course. When I embarked on the assignment, I was looking forward to it because I had never worked with the program and thought it would be a good experience with fairly straight-forward and simple instructions. The directions stated to make a 2 page newsletter to send home with students on the last day of school before summer vacation. So I opened Publisher, selected a design that I liked and was representative of "me" and clicked "Two Page Spread." When the template opened, it displayed a front page, two page insides, and a back page. FOUR pages. I glanced at the directions again, and it said two pages. So I went back into the template selector to make sure I hadn't clicked the wrong one or missed something. It appeared I had not. This must be what was meant by a two page newsletter. I was feeling like this would not be as simple as I had originally thought.

The bulk of my frustration with the assignment was the amount of writing involved. That doesn't really cover the actual software. However, I also encountered many annoyances with the program itself: How to insert a photo into the clip art boxes without making it look wonky and distorted... How to move boxes around without totally ruining the entire layout... How to disconnect the caption box from the photo... How to link stories together that I needed to be longer... An assignment that I thought would take 45 minutes ended up taking close to three hours. Mostly because I was typing a four page newsletter, but also because I was fussing with all these other issues, trying to solve the problems by experimenting until something worked. I probably couldn't even explained how I fixed the stuff cause half the time I just fiddled until it did what I wanted, without really knowing precisely what I did! I finally finished the project and secretly vowed never to use the program again.

When all our assignments had been graded, I took a look at the notes for this project: "Great job! You went way above and beyond the requirements!" Oh really? So I did not have to write a four page newsletter? Then how in the world was I supposed to make a two page one without it being an option! Needless to say, my hatred for Publisher increased ten-fold.

Not until this past week in class, when I was shown how to fix all these little issues- and realized that I could just delete the pages I didn't want in the spread- did I decide to hate Publisher a little less. Deleting pages seems so obvious now, which might make me hate it more for the simpleness of the solution, but at least now I can allow the program to remain on my computer without wanting to scream at the sight of it.

To Blog Or Not To Blog...

As a journalist, blogging has been a big part of my education and professional life. I worked for a website right out of college that converged blogging, print journalism and broadcast journalism in the realm of college news and sports. I took courses in college that revolved solely around blogging as a form of journalism. So, as I embark on a new career as an English teacher with the hopes of teaching journalism or incorporating it into my classroom, the uses for blogging are endless.

In the widest sense, teaching a unit about blogging in journalism and having the students actually blog would be incredibly easy to add into my curriculum. Showing them examples of sports blogs, news blogs and entertainment blogs and then giving them an opportunity to create their own blog within their own interest area would be a great way to expose my students to this element of journalism and give them the chance to be creative. Teaching them the different between personal blogging and journalistic blogging will be a key point in this unit, so the students will also be able to continue exercising the journalism skills that they will have already learned and practice.

Taking this a step further, students could be asked to write journalistic blogs based on other assignments within the curriculum. For example, in a unit about the play Julius Caesar, students could act as a journalist assigned to chronicle the reign and subsequent demise of Caesar. They would be able to take the elements of the story and then "report" them in a blog. An assignment I completed in the college that I would like to adapt for a high school class was constructing a website based around a news story. I wrote print stories and collected audio and video about the different parking options for off campus students. I also incorporated a blog element, where I wrote columns that were opinion based to supplement my stories that were interview based. This would be a fairly easy assignment to adjust for a high school journalism class that would allow students to incorporate all their journalism skills into one project, including a blog that expressed their own opinion on the subject they were covering.

In an English class, the possibilities are endless for using blogging as a teaching tool.