Chapt 8 Rethinking Technology

In the introduction that the ideas of customization, interaction, and learner control are driving the revolution of education.  I agree and additionally think that all of these features will be great advantages to students who are products of this new education.  I wish these opportunities would have been or could even be available in my current/past educational experience.  I think it's very contradictory that some university professors do not practice what they teach.  In our education classes we are told to always make things more hands on or have activities to reinforce lecture since auditory is only ONE type of learning style.  However professors teach as though that information doesn't apply to college students.  When has our learning style changed?  Just because we graduated high school doesn't mean we all become auditory learners, excited to sit through long lectures.  The idea of customized, interactive, and learner controlled education applies to every level of education.  I'm not sure what learner wouldn't want any of those three words to describe his/her learning experience.  And, as was the chapter's point, technology can help achieve all of those new objectives.

Also, I really identified with the paragraph on page 113 that talked about not having to completely build the classroom's technology repertoire.  The district I would ideally like to teach in, as I've repeated many times in this blog, is a low income, rural area.  We definitely do not have the funding available to secure all of these technologies in my classroom.  I am planning to accommodate my students infrequent Internet access and lack of advanced tools like SMARTboards.  I know there are many grants set aside for technology which I plan to apply for, but in case I have to work with what I'm initially given, I try to pick out tools that would give my students the same benefit as more technology advanced districts.  In this section of the book it says "We do not need to start a new education system from scratch," we just need to learn to design the system to reshape, combine and utilize the existing technology.   The rest of the chapter includes ideas on how to take the current assessments and curriculum and redesign them to meet the goals of customization, interaction, and learner control.  I enjoyed this chapter because for the first time, I felt like I could apply the idea of the education revolution even without the newest, most expensive technologies.