Blog Assignment 2

Did You Know 3.0
This was a very interesting video about the exponential rate at which technology is growing, how important it is that we continue to learn and grow with it so that America will not fall behind other countries as technological leaders. The video stated that China soon will be the #1 English speaking country and that India has more honor students than America has students, which are even more reason that we need to prepare our students for the rapid and constant developments of technology.

This video shows that so much information is available to us if we decide to access it. Examples of how we can access this information are given in the video by statistics on the usage of the search engine, Google. The number of searches went from 2.7 billion in 2006 to 31 billion in 2008. Also, the time it took different media to reach an audience of 50 million was radio(38 years), tv(13 years), internet(4 years), Ipod(3 years) and Facebook(2 years). These numbers are amazing and are encouraging to me because they show that we have the technology and the opportunities to keep our place as technological leaders only if we take advantage of and continue to advance with the technology that we have.


Mr. Winkle Wakes
Mr. Winkle Wakes is a video about a cute little man who wakes from a one hundred year sleep to find that the world around him has changed and is full of machines (computers) and new technologies, making him feel disconnected and sad.That is, until he goes to a school to find that is just the way he remembered it and even though they had one of the machines, they didn't really use it, which made him feel good again.

While this video is pretty exaggerated it is a very clever and simple way to show the lack of thought that is put into our children's education and future. I fully agree and understood what Mr. Needleman wanted to share with his viewers with this video. Society seems to hold the areas of business and medicine in such high regards and are always looking to keep these areas technologically developed but in the area of education, teachers are underpaid and the students do not have the resources to keep up with the rate at which technology is growing. This is so important because technology is involved in more and more of our lives and in the future we will need people to fill jobs and be technologically literate to keep up.



Harness Your Student's Digital Smarts
In this video, Mrs. Vicki Davis, explains how she enables her students to become independent learners and exposes them to technology through collaborative and individual projects, blogs, podcasts and also connecting them to students all over the world. Mrs. Davis says that she believes that some students have trouble learning because of the limitations of working only with paper and pen. She teaches them to feel comfortable with any technology they may come across.

I really enjoyed this video and some of the things that Mrs. Davis pointed out, such as, to be a teacher, many people think that they should know everything but actually it is okay to learn as you teach and in some cases, your students may actually end up teaching you. Another point that she made that I fully agree with is that she should not have to define everything but that she can give her students a term and they should know how and where to look for the definition. This belief is better for the student because they will feel more empowered because they did the work to find out what the term means and they will be more likely to remember the information that they find.



The Importance of Creativity
This is an entertaining and wonderfully delivered video of Sir Ken Robinson stating his case on why it is so important to nurture creativity in students. Mr. Robinson believes that children are "being educated right out of their creativity". He states that our education system progressively stops nurturing student's bodies and ends up nurturing solely the left side of their brain. He shares with us the information that our education system was created to meet the needs of industrialism but now, with the advancements of technology changing our world and the way we work, we need to change the way that we educate our students.

I really enjoyed and appreciated many of the points that Mr. Robinson brought up in his talk. One story he shared about Gillian Lynne and how she her educators believed that she had a learning disorder because of her inability to concentrate and remain still in class. While meeting with a specialist for Gillian's problems, her mother discovered that Gillian was simply a dancer and learned better through movement. By the standards of our society today, children like Gillian, are put on medication or in special classes and little or no effort is made to understand and develop an alternative teaching style to help these children.


Can U.S. Students Compete?
In Cecelia Gault’s video, “Can U.S. students compete?”, she interviews Ken Robinson and learns the three myths of creativity:

1. Only certain people are creative
2. Creativity is only about certain things
3. There is nothing you can do about not being creative

Not even a month before watching this video, I realized that if I could learn to be creative, anyone could learn to be creative. I always thought that I could never be a good painter because I was not creative but the truth was that I had to learn to draw to improve my art. After improving my drawing and researching art that I found to be inspirational to me, I found that I am now making art that is very creative.

Creativity is not necessarily taught but is nurtured and I believe that Dr. Strange’s EDM310 class is nurturing my creativity. Dr. Strange does give us objectives to complete in each assignment but there are an infinite number of ways to carry each of them out. He teaches us how to use the tools that we will need in order to create each project and we use our imagination to put our own style into our finished product. This is the reason that I say that we are taught the techniques and we use them to create our own work in our own style. I am learning that, as a future educator, I should give my students the tools that they need to learn but also the space to use their imagination.