(5) Interactivity #3 - Technology Inventory for English Education I

As a future educator, the relevance of this exercise is multifaceted because it provides both the teacher and student with various methods to help aid in learning, organization, collective contribution and collaboration with peers, while further reinforcing education when needed.  Most of these aids are effective for teachers because they provide them with chances to visualize and see Webinars to continually reinvent their craft of teaching.  It also helps teachers in trying to aid students by providing assignments and classroom exercises from outside the classroom to give them feedback on their work.  For students, these technologies provide them with interactive ways of learning, organization skills to aid in understanding, and unique ways to express individuality. 

The group inventory interactivity proved to be a truly enriching aspect to incorporating technology in a classroom.  By working collaboratively as a group, I have been exposed to far more unique technologies than had I done this exercise alone.  These technologies also present to me that, as an educator technology will be a driving force in content comprehension for students.  It will push students further toward an interactive learning.  I also found myself making notes on several of these technologies because I could see how prevalent their usage or involvement would aid in a lesson or help students better understand a concept.  The Google Docs Spreadsheet also allowed for a shared contribution to a greater whole of the project, something that I was not familiar with but will definitely use again in the future.  In all of the content posted, the most important aspect that was threaded through most of our technologies is infusing the Expressive Authoring and accountability aspect to English content.  This particularly means that the most important aspect to English content knowledge is infusing one’s own writing, ideas, and understanding with creativity.  Such technologies like Prezi (for creating presentations), Penzu (online diary writing and sharing), and Wordle (word clouds infused as art) are all interesting to use in classrooms because they provide students with interactive and unique way of expressing themselves.

By meeting with Lizz and Guiliana, we were able to discuss our approaches to using such technologies as well as supplying each other with additional brainstorming and thinking outside of the box for more useful technologies to be included within the spreadsheet. These technologies might be effective for trying to teach kids to work through their dependent reading behaviors like we have learned in READ 411.  It might also be beneficial to see how their content and understanding responds through an assessment as we are learning in CURR 314.  Though each technology does not replace a teacher teaching the content, most provide students with a great additional support to comprehension when not inside a classroom.  As teachers, we will need to supply our students with methods that can help them outside of the classroom so that learning can be a process anywhere they are regardless of a classroom styled instruction.