An Overview of Purpose

I've begun this blog with the primary purpose of recording the various ways in which to incorporate current, up and coming, and theorized technologies into the classroom. With the social media blitz that has captured the majority of our students attentions it is clear that avoiding and restricting their use is far from possible; the can's been opened - but we have the tools to clean it up and redirect our students.

The problem as I see it has become how we transition into the technology age in the classroom. Many schools have strict cell phone policies, but unless everyone in the building enforces it, it has little chance of working. Additionally, we have a generation of students who's only umbilicus to the outside world (and I grant that I generalize here) is their cellular phone. How many times have you left your own home without some form of mobile device? As frightening as it is, once you connect to that consistent and reliable stream of information such devices provide, it feels odd when disconnected.

Remember now that these students have never had to wait for a pay phone in school, never had to wait to catch someone at home, never even had to listen to that once all too familiar sound of dial-up and the inevitable, seemingly endless, wait for music to download.

We live in a global society and whether or not our students realize it overtly, they do sense it. The internet connects us, we can access any relevant information we desire. We can even work on projects with residents of foreign countries in real time.

Given this, we are expecting students who may never have used a physical encyclopedia to out aside that key resource (the internet) and fumble through pages of text to query for answers. It is no wonder they have a hard time giving up the phones?

My belief it is unreasonable to fight an uphill battle, rather we should use it to our advantage. Capturing student attention is one of the greatest desires of teaching... why not use the very things that distract them.

For this reason I will be going into detail about several methods of incorporating internet based media into the classroom, as well as the rational behind my choices.