12/9 - last Sunday blog!

Sorry, I thought that since we were doing a blog in class Wednesday we didn't need one for this Sunday.

The presentations we saw in class last week were very well-done. I liked Jeff's incorporation of the videos even though they didn't work, they would have illustrated his point really well. His take on Second Life was particularly interesting for me because Kristen and I had included Second Life in our presentation on New Technologies in the Classroom. His findings were pretty much the same as ours; despite the criticism that so many people have, the teachers and students who are actually using them as a virtual learning environment have seen extremely positive results. The students love them because they're interactive and fun, and the teachers are finding that kids are learning more because class has an interesting twist to it. I also really liked his example of the virtual world that one of the teachers set up..I think it was about dinosaurs. It's a very constructivist principle to allow students to simply explore the environment and learn for themselves, and I think kids can learn a lot better this way when given the opportunity. It makes learning so much more fun for students, to the point where sometimes they don't even realize they're learning. I would love to try it.

The other presentation done by Amanda and Emily was great too, and was interesting for me because I have taken a Special Learners in the Regular Classroom course here at Fairfield. We talked a little about assistive technology used to help special learners in the classroom, such as hearing aids and magnifiers for the hearing or seeing impaired. This technology is a huge advancement in allowing students to learn in the "least restrictive environment," which is the goal of special education. Since I have some background in the area, I liked this presentation a lot.

I received positive feedback on my school visit paper, so I'm glad my work was appreciated. I thought Fairfield did a pretty good job with their efforts in incorporating technology in the classroom. The teachers I observed were especially persistent in using it every day, and I have a lot of respect for how much time it must take to prepare a PowerPoint presentation for every single lesson, especially considering that they meet with multiple classes each day. I will definitely use their example as a guideline for how I want to teach. Maybe not every day, but I will definitely use PowerPoint to give my students the visul element that has proven so helpful to me and most other students.