The wants and needs of technology.

I’m torn on this topic.  I love technology I believe it brings learning styles and capabilities together.  However I struggle with the difficulties of technology for work and pleasure at home. 

Some of the good sides of technology at home are that we now have options when it comes to watching television, we can download it, stream it or log into a website like Netflix to watch online.  We can choose to talk to the rest of the world for free using gaming consoles (finding other people playing the same games) or by using a site like Skype. 

The distracting side of technology is watching TV instead of doing homework or house work.  The instant gratification of technology makes some homework a challenge like when students expect to master facts instantly.  (I’ve run into this when working with my sons on their multiplication and spelling) They think that if they do the task once that’s good enough, or I don’t need to know it faster just how to do it once after that I can rely on technology e.g. Calculator or spell-check to figure things out after that.

 

Technology absorbs a person for hours!  If you find something that you are super interested in, you want to prove your buddy wrong (ya like that ever happens) or it’s social networking, a way of knowing everything about someone without actually knowing them!  

I am guilty of having multiple tabs open on my browser to look at “stuff” seriously nothing I need to know.  Watching multiple episodes of a TV show online just because the next one is there instead of pacing myself.

I haven’t mastered the total zone out that my children have though.  There they are staring at a screen with the blank look in their eyes and the mouth open a bit….come on we’ve all seen that glazed look.  I can stand 2 feet away from them and start talking and they don’t hear or see me until I stand in front of the television to block their view of the show or game that they are trying to watch.

www.readwritegold.com

At work I use technology every day.  I used my IPhone a lot last year in a life skills class that I taught.  When I had my students out grocery shopping, at the library, out cross country skiing I took pictures of them.  When we came back to the school they could share with other staff and students what they had done on their field trips by looking at the pictures and being able to recall what they had done.  This gave them the confidence of being able to stand in front of the class and share without being embarrassed or loosing focus on the task at hand.   They also created more detailed journal entries.  For our journaling we used a laptop that had a couple of special programs installed in it one was called Boardmaker and the other was Read and Write Gold.  Without these two programs my students wouldn’t have been able to verbalize what they had learned in the classes.  The part of the Boardmaker program that I used gives you pictures that go with the words as you type so if you can’t read very well there are visual prompts to help.  The Read and Write Gold program reads what you have typed and has a screen reader so wherever you put the cursor/mouse to it will read to you and it will also read web pages.  Now the students I was working with could do research with the rest of the class and create presentations!  They were so happy to be included and not have to do a version of the same project. 

Technology is something we need to use in moderation.  It’s a wants verses needs struggle that we need to learn and be able to teach out students how to use wisely.