Blogged Out!

The semester and this unit has run its course so quickly, however the amount of knowledge I have gained and the learning opportunities that this unit has offered has been enormous. Not forgetting to mention our lecturor, Lina, who has greatly enhanced my learning on all the innovations and made the experience a lot more fun and motivating to work with.

This unit has encouraged me to understand technology and all it has to offer and what different ways I can use technology in the classroom with my students. I hope to take everything I have learnt from this unit into the classroom setting with me. Although some innovations I may not use in the Early Childhood classroom, like Twitter and Second Life, these are technologies that I myself hope to continue using in order to expand my network of educators and my knowledge on effective teaching strategies. A innovative technology that I hope to use in my teaching career is SmartBoards, not only do I think they have great educational value but they motivate me and they always have new SmartBoard resources available for teachers to use in the classroom to teach specific concepts in an interactive way.

Having the opportunity to explore Second Life (my selected innovation), allowed me to see how advanced technology actually is. I now understand how much and how many technology programs there are and how they are linked to education. All the innovations that we learnt about in this unit have offered a great range of teaching ideas and ways children can learn in a variety of different ways.

“How can we share new knowledge and resources about one innovation to bridge the digital divide between those who ‘know’ and those who ‘don’t know’?”. In regards to this question, I believe it all comes down to research, experience with the innovation, advice, and expert training. As I found out, we can only truly understand technology and all it has to offer through our own exploration and experience and training from experts or more experienced individuals. In doing this, people will become more understanding of certain innovations and how they work. If people do not understand technology programs, learning and use of these programs simply becomes ineffective and a waste of time. It is more important to educate yourself and others on the innovation before effective use can take place. Therefore, in order to fill the gap that is causing this digital divide, people must talk to experts or attend presentations (like what this unit has offered us), explore and experience the program for themselves and research the innovated technology (e.g. Wiki Pages).

I can honestly say, at the beginning of this semester I barely knew anything about the innovations that we covered in class. Looking back now, I can just picture and visually see how much I have learnt over the weeks. The learning has been enormous and the experience has been engaging and motivating. I like how this unit gave us, as students, the opportunity to take on board an innovation and learn about it for ourselves and then teach it to our peers. This made the unit more meaningful and allowed us to be the teachers and educate everyone else on how our innovation could be used in the classroom.

I hope my knowledge on these innovations continues to develop to help assist me for use in the classroom.

Thanks to Lina, Sue Waters and everyone one in ‘Using Computers in the Classroom’ for making this unit and the learning within it such a great experience and so much fun!