This week we read an article entitled Distance education trends: Integrating new technologies to foster student interaction and collaboration by Yoany Beldarrain (2006). This article explores the benefits of emerging technology tools "to foster student interaction in online learning" (p. 139).
The last couple of lines in the article really made me think: "The demand for distance education will only continue to grow. The ever-evolving nature of technology will continue to push distance educators to use new tools to create learning environments that will indeed prepare students to be life-long learners, who can problem solve through collaboration with global partners" (p. 150). Upon reading these lines I felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility as a teacher to effectively utilize technology in student learning, but also a great enthusiasm to be a part of something as great as distance education. The tools of distance education are evolving at a very quick rate and will continue to do so--this could make any teacher feel overwhelmed. However, I think it is important to remember that rather than trying to use every technology that comes along, we should only use technology to augment those things that already need to be taught. This will certainly be my approach to using technology in education.
Also, we viewed presentations on both Google Docs and PowerPoint. Google Docs is relatively new to me so this was a very helpful presentation. I was impressed with the overall completeness of the presentation. It reinforced a few things I knew and provided some new information as well.
As for PowerPoint, the presentation was great. I agree with the presenter that PowerPoint should be a tool used by the teacher and not the teacher itself. I once had a professor that relied entirely upon PowerPoint for each of his lectures, so I understand this point completely. I also appreciated the the fact that the presentations commented on how to use PowerPoint in a learning environment as well as how to construct a PowerPoint presentation.
This was a great week. The aforementioned article was particularly thought-provoking.
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David,
ReplyDeleteYou said, "I think it is important to remember that rather than trying to use every technology that comes along, we should only use technology to augment those things that already need to be taught. This will certainly be my approach to using technology in education." This is such a great point to remember. In a class like this it might be tempting to try and incorporate many new technologies at once resulting in an ineffective use of all of them. However if you take one area that needs a little boost and pace the rate at which you incorporate new tools it can be a great supplement. I don't care how col the technology gets, nothing can replace the teacher.