Dewey, Chapter 1

1. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.

Life is what you make it. If you use resources in the environment to help succeed, your life opens more avenues of life therefore making it “new.”
The same is true with education. If you use educational and technological resources to help you succeed, the future will be more rewarding and successful. Learning never stops.

2. Continuity of life means continual re-adaptation of the environment to the needs of the living organisms.

In the content of technology today, I feel that this is the opposite here. I feel that technology is ever evolving and living things are forced to adapt to the change of the technology. Technology has made the world more manageable, but the technology is so rapidly changing that is hard for living things to keep up with the advances.

3. Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative.

This is important with education today. Students need to use on another to bounce ideas off of during assignments. Learning should be more discovery. Therefore communicating with one another gives the students an opportunity to learn a different point of view, but also the ability to debate their points of view. Education is nothing without communication. There are different forms of communicating. For example for the context of this course, collaboratively working on an assignment via the internet would be an effective form of communication. Therefore this form of communication is educative.

What level of Bloom's taxonony did you experience most in your post secondary education? Why do you think this was so?

My post secondary experience here at East Stroudsburg would be categorized into the two higher ordering thinking categories, evaluating and creating. In the Master's ELED program, we have talked collaboratively in groups about influential people in education. (Evaluating) We have been asked to research certain educators (Bloom, Gardner, Dewey, Paley, Cortes, and Walker) and use the research to learn and model their experiences through papers, lessons, powerpoints, etc. We do this with one goal in mind, to educate the children the best we can. We use our judgements to critique and judge these educators' prior knowledge and experiences to see if we agree and can use their ideas and thoughts in our classrooms. Secondly, in the Master's ELED program, we have created many projects to enhance learning in our own classrooms. I have completed various projects that included interactive math bulletin boards, social studies' Kid-friendly power point on Africa, science experiments for kids, literacy stations, and reading inventories and hands-on activities for struggling readers. All these projects and/or activities make learning more engaging and more fun for the students to learn the curriculum.

The reason that the Master's ELED program is geared towards the higher order thinking categories are to challenge teachers to be more creative and flexible. Teachers should use and apply what they learn and create more interesting and engaging lessons and activities for their students in their classroom. The students today learn differently than thirty plus years ago. They do not want to be lectured or asked to read pages from a textbook during class. They want to be challenged. In this technological world, students want to learn through different media. They want to learn through making their own powerpoints, webquests, podcasts, and interactive websites. In order for students today to succeed in the future, they need to be equipped with old knowledge and resources that they can later connect to future information. As educators, we are responsible to prepare the students for the future by teaching them what we can about now. Creating projects from previous classes or learning to create technological projects will help the students to become as prepared as they can be for their next step in the future.

Why should we, as educators, integrate technology into the curriculum?

Technology is more engaging for students than listening to lectures or reading from textbooks. Technology makes learning more actively engaging for the students, which they need especially with such diverse learning styles in classrooms today. Kids love technology, (Cellphones, Laptops, Ipods, Nintendo DS, Play Station, etc). Why not use such technology in the classrooms? I feel that it would be an advantage for the teacher as well as the students. Cellphones and laptops can allow students to research any topic at just the push of a button. Students can complete projects and post them for others students around the world to view and learn. Students are more technologically sound than many teachers were growing up so students love to learn through various forms of technology (Podcasts, interactive web quests). Teachers need to step out of the role of lecturer. I agree with Mr. Wilson from the video, teachers need to be more of a coach and use technology as the resource/tool. As discussed in class and through my own eyes, students learn from doing as well as from working from one another in groups. Teachers need to educate students to be competent citizens in the 21st Century. Technology needs to be more integrated in schools. Teachers like Mr Wilson need to be more flexible and willing in their teaching. Some teachers are still teaching the same thing using the same worksheets and textbooks that they have used for years. Technology is so advanced that it would allow for students to be more creative with learning and creating projects and in return they are learning more material. I am one of the those teachers that need to become more comfortable with technology so that I can integrate it into my classroom. I just need to coordinate or organize a way that I can use computers more in my classroom. I am a teacher that has laptops that are from a cart. So I can only use four at a time, but maybe there is a way to "buy" more time. I am hoping that I will learn a lot in this class that will provide support for more time. We will see!