Blog Entry #2

Blog Entry #2

          As I think about my Multimedia Montage Project, I am eager to join an online community of educators, administrators and educator consultants who are discussing and posting interesting ideas about technology application implementation. I am interested in technology apps that enhance student engagement and learning in the classroom. I am curious about how teachers are utilizing these applications to improve classroom learning and trigger a better response from their students. Another reason that I take a strong interest to this topic is: Last year, I was chosen to attend a technology training session in which the Apple presenters spoke about how to operate the new ipads (hardware and software) that each middle school teacher was given. In response to that, I became more curious about the various educational technology apps that could be infused by the teacher in a language arts classroom to help students learn better. Being a novice, I was completely blown away with the vastness of how technology applications can be utilized to enhance the quality of instruction. Hence, I became more curious. In fact, my research topic for my dissertation centers around technology applications that improve student writing performance. (I’m in the Ed.D. teacher leadership program at Rutgers).  

          I am planning on joining twitter, which is a great tool that will allow me to read interesting articles and posts of members who share the same interests as me. I can follow educators, administrators and others who also share an interest in technology and specifically “technology applications and writing.” I can use this tool from my phone, which means I can continuously learn from a variety of settings.  I will join Edutopia because within this community, I will be able to watch educational videos related to my topic and I can even generate my very own community. I am also planning to join two additional community groups within the Google Plus community. I will need to look into this more carefully very soon in order to become familiar with the various capabilities within the community itself. Most importantly, I’m looking for various technology apps that I could try out in my class and then introduce it to the faculty in my building.  I am in need of additional technology knowledge so by joining these communities hopefully I will gain a better since of technology implementation.

The topic that I plan to explore for this project will be technology implementation (apps) in language arts classrooms, and I’m looking to examine or explore how the “DIY” concept fits into my project. One particular aspect in the first chapter that caught my attention was the idea about the: “emerging participatory culture.” I think understanding this fundamental idea of how individuals can both be consumers and producers of media plays a vital role in the way in which people construct their understanding of the media. Typically, when I think of media I usually think about videos on you tube. Prior to reading the first chapter, I never visualized myself as a participatory agent when it comes to developing media. I think this idea of participatory culture empowers individuals to control what messages or images are being sent into the world. Therefore, individuals are no longer passive and become active participants in the influencing power of digital media (Knobel, 2010).  I want to see how digital media influences student thinking and as a teacher leader I am definitely interested in learning how I can produce digital media that shapes how teacher implement technology (if this makes sense).

 

 

Reference

Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (2010). DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. Peter Lang: New York, NY.