Standard 4.3
I feel like diversity is hot topic in American society today. For this standard I feel that the blog I completed on Diversity in my Internet Tools course satisfies what is needed for this artifact. For this blog we were tasked with reading a few articles on the issues of diversity in technology. One of them was about assistive technology and how meets a need for diverse students, in particular students with special needs. This is where diversity needs to be explained as more than race and ethnicity, but students who show other qualities such special needs, giftedness, and creativity. Throughout the blog written and put on my Weebly I continue to answer questions about diverse populations. The readings included with this blog also dealt with getting students to understand the people around them and to be aware of issues globally as well connecting globally. In creating this blog I had to view the issues from the authors perspective as well as form my own opinion from my experiences. The difficulty is to open up your mind to something new and not be so closed off with what you have done or seen in prior experiences. With this blog I was able to share with my principal my findings and get her thoughts about what the future holds for education. I was also able to show her my plans of implementing blogs in the classroom to create a community amongst my students.
From the readings for the blog, I was able to get a better understanding of my diverse students need and aids to assist in the learning process. Assistive technology is a huge boost for student learning. Being able to offer students digital tools to help learn concepts is a win for teachers because that allows teachers to be freed up to help other students in the classroom. Assistive technology can be helpful in such a diverse classroom, like we all teach in because of “No Child Left Behind.” Assistive technology can be a beneficial tool to help students with special needs. The second article dealt with pushing students to be the center of the classroom and not the teacher. I am a huge proponent of this movement because it opens up so many doors to create higher level questioning for your students. This type of questioning will allow teachers to bring up issues and relate them to content. Here students will be able to communicate with each other both inside and outside the classroom. Cultural understanding is huge problem in society and our classroom is a great place to teach about this problem. In the blog I talk about this new digital age and teaching students to respect the technology is the teachers’ job. We as teachers also have to teach that not all students are equal. Today’s students do a good job of hiding poverty and students need to be aware these. I continually model the appropriate behaviors for students in regards to culture and technology. In my blog I talk about allowing students to blog about current issues that face our country and our world, and this gets the students thinking globally. This gets them out Moody, Al and gets them thinking about how the world affects their lives daily. This is such a great tie in to my curriculum in Social Studies that I have begun to use discussion post weekly and relate content we have discussed to issues we are seeing in the work today. Of course modeling what is expected in these discussions and blogs is key, so normally I give them a rubric and an example of a post to guide them in the process.
I took a lot of great things away from researching and writing this blog post. As a teacher if you never continue to seek new ways to do things you will never be an effective teacher. Our society is every changing and the students need to be served in the best way. We as educators need to be life-long learners ourselves and continue to research and find new ways to engage our students and help them achieve great things. I feel that assistive technology and blogging is a great way to extend a lesson, reinforce what has been taught, and give the students a different type of lesson. If I could do anything different with this blog post, I think that I would take the opportunity to set up a wiki for faculty members to use and find resources as well as digital tools to take their teaching to the next level. This would serve to make the school a better place for students to attend. By teachers raising the stakes in the classroom, our students will be better prepared when the stakes are raised after high school. This can be assessed through classroom observations and through lesson plans turned into the administration. Technology and digital tools should drive our teaching methods.
blog_post_diversity.docx | |
File Size: | 15 kb |
File Type: | docx |