Over the past few weeks, we've made some use of Diigo, an online social bookmarking tool allowing the user to share bookmarked websites with others, along with various comments around the page. Diigo seems like it could be a very useful tool in a teaching setting. First off, it gives you the ability to easily share websites with colleagues, and second, it lets you share important websites with your students or give them an easy way to share websites among themselves. It also seems useful for solo usage in giving an easy way to organize your thoughts to look back on a web page later on.
Allowing students to share sites between themselves would definitely help in making teaching easier, but of course that would not remotely do my job for me. I still have to actively teach, and what can be a very useful tool for that is PowerPoint. PowerPoint can be used in all sorts of ways, but in this case it can be used to guide students to mastery of material in accordance with Bloom's Taxonomy- remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Maybe the most obvious usage of PowerPoint is for that first one- by setting up some sort of quiz game through PowerPoint, it encourages students to remember terms and ideas. Encouraging understanding, however, would take a little more work, in the sense that a similar format could be used but it would require more complex questions and maybe a different type of game setup. Applying would be largely based on using sections of a PowerPoint to encourage discussion in order to relate ideas being learned to other things. Analyzing could take the form of using the PowerPoint to break the students up into groups for group discussions in order to draw comparisons between different ideas being covered, and then, say, bring the groups back together to see what they had to say about the subject at hand. In the way of evaluation, a PowerPoint could be used to sort of pose questions for something of a debate over key ideas that were covered, thus encouraging students to interact with the ideas and actively appraise them. Creation is a weird one in that I really have trouble thinking of any way a PowerPoint could encourage students to create their own, original work except through putting out an assignment for them to do and turn in. Maybe some sort of project? This is something I will probably need to put some more research into.
Speaking of further research, professional development is a big part of being a teacher. As technology changes and becomes more advanced, the profession changes with it and demands more and more connection with that technology. If I want to last all that long as a teacher, I need to find a way to stay on top of new tech. One site I found to help keep track of new technology and more specifically its effects in the classroom is the Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis, which offers articles and papers covering new technology being used in education and various effects associated with it, both good and bad. It seems to have a number of interesting articles covering topics ranging from online classes to educational text messaging. It seems like something I will definitely want to read through a little more in the future.
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