#8 - The Story So Far

This was a bit more of an eye-opener than I thought it would be.  I chose to use the, Active learning example at the Infusion state, opting for the Shared Access as opposed to the 1-1which turned out to be a good thing since the video for the 1-1 example is currently down.

The concept was very simple, almost cute really.  It’s a bunch of kids putting together a magazine.  I laughed a little to myself thinking, “that’s adorable!  They’ll write about how hard math is, and about what’s on their Christmas lists.” That’s just about the point where they began to shut me up.  Yeah, there was nothing about teddy-bears in there, no “Twilight” or “Transformers” either, at least not that I saw.  It was, in fact, a magazine.  Neither infantile nor ground-breaking, just a magazine.  Strangely enough that turned out to be the genius of it.  This was an actual magazine with a sports section, movie and book reviews, the whole nine.  They each accepted roles within the hierarchy of their assignment, as either writers or editors, and saw to it that their magazine was created utilizing a scanner, the internet and simple production programs that came standard on their computers.   Even their teacher was amazed at how far her kids went when she took off the training-wheels and just let them run with it.  They even figured out how to get money for the magazine through advertisements.  

But the best part about everything that I saw was how they were handling the technology that they were presented with.  They saw the hardware and software for what they were, tools.  They weren’t intimidating, they were just what was used to get the job done.

I think it’s odd how often I take for granted just how much of technology I am so familiar with.  I was much more fluent than I thought I was at the start of this class, and I am doing even better now.  Calming down and just taking the time to learn these systems puts them in a different light that allows me to see things a bit more clearly.  That’s what makes the ideas put forth in the NETS and executed in the Technology Integration Matrix so important.  They’re introducing these technologies to their students at the right time and in the right way so that they’re familiar to them, even boring.  They’ll be more equipped to handle what’s out there and what will follow, even more than me.