Social Networking in the Classroom and on the Job

Oh Facebook. So many wonderful possibilities, so many tragic misunderstandings. What a lot of people don't realize is that they do leave a digital footprint whenever they tag a photo or post a comment on social networking sites. People need to be especially aware of how websites like Facebook can actually cause a lot more harm than good in the professional world. It is incredibly important to keep up a professional front on social networking sites; watching what you say and removing incriminating photos of yourself (or just not posting them at all) is incredibly important. Anyone can access Facebook, including potential or current bosses, administration, students, and their parents. Teachers need to pay particularly close attention to what they do on social networking sites to avoid negative backlash, whether it be angry parents, bosses, or news reporters.

With that said, social networking sites can be a wonderful teaching tool to use in the classroom. For example, students could create a profile page based off of a historical figure. English teachers could assign characters to different students, who would then have to create accounts based on that character, including their likes and dislikes, who their friends are, their favorite quotes, etc. The students could then be told to interact with each other as their characters would interact with one another. A great example of this would use the play Romeo and Juliet. The first post on Romeo's Facebook wall would probably be something about him and Rosaline ending their relationship and being dragged to a ball by his friends. Mercutio and Benvolio could write on his wall and his new relationship status would become "it's complicated" with Juliet Capulet.

Facebook is easy to incorporate into a classroom with techniques like this in mind. As an English teacher, I could use it to assess the depths to which my students understand character development in the different works we read throughout the year.

Using Technology in an English Classroom

For this post, I will be commenting on the article "Plugging In: What Technology Brings to the English/Language Arts Classroom" by Sara Kajder. Kajder begins the article by noting that technology should never be used to teach students; it cannot replace a teacher. Instead technology should be used as a tool to aid understanding. She explains the three "nonnegotiable" questions that she asks before introducing new technology in her classroom: "How does the task at hand help to empower my middle school students to be powerful communicators, rich thinkers, and compelling writers?" "How does this technology allow us to ‘do it better?" and  "Is this task a rigorous complement or alternative to existing curriculum?” (Kajder, 7). If the answer to any of these questions is "No," she explains, then she does not use the technology in the classroom. However, on many occasions, Kajder has found technology to be a wonderful compliment to her existing curriculum, especially in the forms of web blogs, online collaborative projects, interactive tools, and digital video tools. She points out that teachers should not assume that students know everything about technology and reiterates that teachers should not use technology in the classroom unless there is a clear benefit to be gained (and of course if any of the three questions cannot be answered in the affirmative). The case that she gives as an example is her seventh-grade Language Arts classroom and students who range from "tech-savv[y] to the most hesitant" (Kajder, 8). She discusses the above mentioned activities that the students completed with technology and how much it benefited her students.

I felt that this article was very informative. The class that Kajder depicts is far more realistic than many people assume; it is easier to believe that all students today are tech-savvy than it is to try to teach them basic computer skills. The projects that she discusses, which include the Favorite Poem Project, Poetry Forge, web blogs, and iMovie, all seem very much related to the content area and actually inspired my to use some of these tools as well. I feel that these projects would have all scored fairly high on the chart of Transparent Integration and were more transparent than opaque.

As I mentioned, I would love to use similar resources in my own classes. If Kajder evaluated these sites and tools on her three point question system and found none of them lacking, I have to assume that they would be decently effective in an English/Language Arts classroom. I am not afraid to use technology in my classroom if the benefits outweigh the negatives, and the ideas that she presents for teaching poetry seem as though they would really help motivate reluctant poets to learn.

Kajder, Sara. "Plugging In: What Technology Brings to the English/Language Arts Classroom." Voices from the Middle 11.3 (2006): 6 - 9. Web. 19 Nov. 2011.

The Ethics of Technology Use

How necessary is it for me, as a teacher, to use technology ethically in my classroom? I would say it is essential. If I were to pirate materials online and then use them in my lessons, what sort of message is that sending to my students? As a teacher, I consider myself to be not only an academic instructor, but a life coach as well. In a world in which students spend more time playing video games than they do speaking to their parents, I feel that teachers need to help further their students' moral knowledge just as they need to further their knowledge in English or mathematics. If I download something illegally and use it to teach my students, the bigger message that they will receive is that I condone activities such as downloading materials online without purchasing them. 

I, however, am not completely innocent in terms of downloading things online. This summer, I was hired to tutor a girl in Japanese. I had a textbook and workbook from when I was just starting out, but I needed a new copy of the workbook for my student to use. Instead of buying a new one or forcing my student to buy one, I downloaded a new copy. The job never came to fruition, though, so I deleted the downloaded workbook from my computer. At the time, I felt that I was doing a good thing by getting the materials that my student would need without any added cost for her, but I now regret this action despite having purchased the workbook from the company previously. I definitely don't want to show support for downloaded material, least of all to my students. I will never do this in the future - anything worth using in my classroom is worth paying for.

In my classroom, I will make sure to use only the technology that I can access legally, such as videos on YouTube (that aren't copyrighted) or websites specifically used by teachers. Perhaps I would even have a short lesson on the negative effects of downloading pirated materials. I want to help my students to see that illegal activities, no matter how innocent they seem, are never a legitimate option in life.

Monitoring Internet security is a major issue in the digital age. Opening a certain web page or email can result in a debilitating virus, which usually never ends well. I also would not like having my students click on a link and find their computer screens flooded with inappropriate advertisements. Before I have my students do any sort of activity online, I would make sure to investigate the website thoroughly to make sure that nothing inappropriate or harmful will come of using it in my classroom. I would also advise my students to create secure accounts to prevent hacking issues in my classroom.

Online Classes

I am a digital native, but I do not believe that teachers can be replaced by computers. Computers are not instructors, but tools used to help aid teaching and learning. I do, however, think that teachers need to change up their methods of teaching to adapt to today's students. Teachers are only as effective as their methods, and when our students change, so too must our practices. If a person wishes to be hired as a teacher in the future, they must be willing to implements technology in their classes.

There are some subjects that require one-on-one teacher-student interaction, like learning to play an instrument or a particularly tricky math problem. Each student may need the material to be explained to them multiple times in different ways before they can understand what it is they need to do to succeed. Computers cannot facilitate this, but teachers can. A teacher can see what a student needs in order to help them succeed. In terms of math classes, computers may not be able to detect cheating (like having a cheat sheet or a calculator) that a teacher would easily be able to stop.

I like the idea of offering online classes to high school and college students who have a choice to take them, but I don't think that they will replace regular classroom settings permanently. I have taken several online classes so far, and I can say with certainty that I much prefer being in a real classroom versus a virtual one. It's so easy to forget about a class you don't attend regularly, especially when students have a full class load. Additionally, school districts like GRPS may see online classes as the future of education, but they need to take into account their school population. Do most of their students have home computers or the internet? I know where I am teacher assisting, many students would be completely unable to participate in online classes because they don't own a computer. If online classes are really the way education is headed, and effort must be made to get these students connected somehow. I feel as though that would be a major obstacle for many districts.

As for the original question regarding my thoughts on the opinions posed in the videos, I feel like having a more technology-based high school experience may have helped, but only to a certain extent. My high school was by no means underfunded and we therefore had a lot of technology in the classrooms already. I recall working with online stock market games, video editing software, and website-building programs, just to name a few. Some classes, like a particularly boring history class I took, could have been much more engaging for me personally if they had departed from the typical lecture/note-taking format, and online or technology-based resources could have helped. Some courses were just fine as they were. Would I have rather had online classes? Definitely not. Would more technology in the classroom have been a good thing? Of course.