Integrating Technology Blog

            The implications of the Maker Revolution lie primarily in the possibilities of task reimagination, in my opinion. The idea of “making” as a central construct in education is a familiar one to anybody working with literature. When interpreting, analyzing, and according to scholars like Robert Scholes, even just reading a work, the reader is engaged in making. The discipline of English is centered around the use of language to construct meaning, which means that the Maker Revolution isn’t so revolutionary in English classrooms. Any act of writing is an act of making, and if there is an appropriate emphasis on writing, the students are already makers. However, the Revolution can be extended, by making writing the focus of project-based learning. The possibilities for the variety of tasks is astounding. Students completing a unit about civil disobedience could read and interpret Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and research an issue that they felt str...

Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" TED Talk is incredibly interesting and seems to prophesy great and wonderful things for education in the near future. The implications of his research are intriguing and show that the human capacity for learning by doing is incredible. I have seen this anecdotally in my nephew, who by the age of 1 was able to maneuver his way around a smartphone. I think the implications for the future classroom are that technology will increasingly be adopted at the same pace as it is in wider society, and not the kind of delayed trickle-down that characterizes technological adaptation in the classroom now (e.g. the potential of iPads in the classroom being several years behind their release and adoption by society at large).  The potential for advanced instruction at earlier and earlier ages is also an exciting potentiality Mitra proposes, and one I agree with wholeheartedly. In English, at least, the work that is the traditional preserve of A...

My strategies for determining if the items were real or fake were for the most part sound. The first image was clearly fake, as the jet looked like it was from a picture taken in the middle of the day and the background city was much darker. Also, when I checked the answers, there was a cursor left in the image which I missed. The reviews were a little trickier, and I misidentified review #1 as fake, as it seemed overly specific and written to catch search engine traffic. The Jefferson quotes were easier, although I misidentified #1 as a real quote, which quite honestly was because it sounded like a Jefferson quote. This assumption is a pitfall with historical figures, I think. My identification of #3 as fake was accurate, and I thought it was pretty obvious. For starters, gun control wasn't a thing in Jefferson's time, as they were, you know, rebelling against the Crown and all. Also, the use of "great" was far too informal for somebody from the Colonial times. All i...

Flipped Learning   Flipped learning holds the biggest potential for my current and future classrooms. Flipping the high school ELA classroom brings the environment closer to the university environment, where the readings are done outside of class and class time is used for discussion and exploration of the text. In the secondary classroom, the flipped learning model will allow students to read the texts/material at home and then come to class to have discussions, Socratic seminars, take part in collaborative writing assignments, participate in writing workshops for assignments relating to the text being studied, and many other options. It allows the valuable instructional time to be oriented completely around interacting with the content rather than laboriously covering the content. Additionally, flipped learning allows for the coverage of grammar, mechanics, and style conventions through video lectures, powerpoints, or other presentation tools. Students can view the "lectu...

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