Reflection Block Three

This reflection and the next ones are all contributions from my prograstinating self. Lol! Well I am finally back on track and thus will do a series of reflective contributions based on each of the blocks that I have been trailing.

Block three is basically where I stopped, so I will begin here in hopes that I will indeed fulfill my mission.

Back in block two, we were asked to follow an educational blog. I chose the Fischbowl. I wanted to start with this since it requires a way of thinking and contributing to our way of handling our technology side of our professional self. Some of us are technology savy, while some of us are awestruck by the capabilities we can use to improve our way of teaching or deliver knowledge.
I am a bit of both I would like to believe, the teaching staff at school view me as an expert in computers, while I am a bit apprehensive in exploring new tools. I believe that this is in part of being afraid that I will mess up, but I know too that we learn from mistakes and if we want our students to take risks then we should too, don't you think? One of the thought provoking questions that Fisch asks is: What's the Purpose of Schools? Perhaps you can answer that and view his blog. Fisch has posted two answers the earlier one was: "... to appropriately prepare our children for their future." Then later on he posted another answer: "... to make the world a better place." I share in Fisch's answers, but I also believe that education is about assisting students find their mission in life.

I like experimenting, this is the way I taught myself how to use the computer and all that it has to offer. The contributing factor from this class is that it has exposed me to a wide variety of other tools that I could use to improve learning in the students that I work with. I do take every opportunity to expose my students to technology. I have taught my students to utilize the Google components in our Information Processing classes. Because we couldn't save our work into the hard drive and the Floppy Disk has become obsolete in the newer versions of the computers, they needed a way to save their work and so they used the 'google documents' to save their work on-line. Rather than hand me a hard copy of their work they e-mailed me their assignments, this way I would have their work on hand.

Because the school's computers are firewalled very strictly we could only access a very limited exposure to what is available out there. There is a reason for this though, students were accessing sites that would potentially harm the computers (viruses) and thus is the case. However some students were able to access other sites by 'tunneling' and therefore more strict rules were enforced. I couldn't believe students had this knowledge, it is funny though that they are more knowledgable about technology than we are. Take for example my eight year old taught me something on the computer the other week, she showed me how to open another tab so I wouldn't lose my web page that I was working on. Truly, truly amazing! I asked her how she learned that and she said I tried it (she was experimenting)! I felt kind of dumb that I was being out performed by an eight year old and here I was a Master in the Making!