As a society, we have become increasingly dependent on technology is various forms and for various reasons. One of the constant reasons to integrate technology into your life is to make it simpler. Wether or not it truly makes your life simpler is difficult to say and is based upon your use of technology. The goal for many educators is to reach all of their students but many of them do not understand how to incorporate technology in the classroom. This week we looked at Extend, which is a site constructed to help educators to better incorporate technology into their classrooms in order to aid all learners.
In the scenario at the beginning of the module, Terry wanted to incorporate technology in a way that would benefit all of his learners. After talking to his colleagues and completing the Extend module, he incorporated the XYZ technology.
One of the main components of Extends modules is Digital literacies. Digital literacies use technology to address specific learning challenges on an individual basis. Digital literacies effectively locate, use, summarize, evaluate, create, and communicate information while using digital technologies and web-based platforms. It also includes the knowledge to engage safely and ethically in online communities. Developing digital literacies never stops as it is an ongoing process. As educators, it is our responsibility to
Design thinking sparks new ideas through creating and experimenting. It is human-centered so the people creating and experimenting will actually benefit from the product. In the classroom, it allows students to work together to come up with a solution to a known challenge. Design-Thinking involves a 5 step process: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Connect. The process invites educators to empathize with their students so that they can define their students challenge. Once the challenge has been defined, the educator can begin to ideate which technology would be beneficial to their students. Once the educator has chosen a technology they can begin to prototype it to their students so that they can refine it and make it better for their learners. The final step is to connect the curriculum into the technology so that the students challenge will not hinder learning in anyway.
I chose to create a twitter essay for this reflection because it is a technology that I have barely used. We were told to stretch a bit for this reflection so that is what I am doing here. I found twitter to be fairly easy to use although I will admit I did ask for some help when it came to using threads to connect tweets. Having run through the Extend module with myself in mind, I think this is a good platform in which I could see students reflecting on their learning or even writing stories about events in the world. I imagine this would be a technology that many of my future students will be very familiar and comfortable with using.
