Thursday

turning techie

Here's a great article about bringing technology into the classroom. I think it's worth thinking about how we can use technology in our center to help our students learn. So many of them are very savvy when it comes to texting, emailing and IM-ing. How can we use those things to improve what we do? As we talked about in our last Common Time, we've been working with the Math Dept to offer ALEKS, a self-paced, online math tutorial, to more of our students. I'd like to offer more.

So I wonder if any of you have ideas about how we can infuse more technology into what we do.

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/Departments/Elementary/Default.aspx?article=TeensBetterWriters

2 comments:

  1. I have so many ideas that I don't know where to begin, or even if they're actually even effective as tools.

    As an undergrad, once or twice I tutored a student who was (and still is, I'm guessing) deaf. This was a challenge, since I don't speak ASL, so we resorted to typing our responses using MS Word - although later someone pointed out that we could have also used a chat client, which I didn't think of. I like the idea of tutoring through a chat client, or even a Web cam, maybe having a few satellites, or being able to tutor from home (like having an "on call" tutor during really busy times of the semester).

    Tech is supposed to help students become better writers (sayeth the English teacher) but I don't think it can unless/until we really consider the differences in writing styles, learning styles, and how differences in how we write - for example, writing on actual paper vs. writing using word processing software - affect how we write. Some people find it effective to write on actual paper, and find it easier to edit, whereas some (like me) find it easier to move sentences and paragraphs around using cut-and-paste. I think it leads to an interesting discussion on how we look at writing and reflect on why and how we write like we do.

    It would be really easy for me to write for a long time about this, but it's an interesting topic and I wonder how much there is out there that investigates and analyzes writing patterns based on the technology that's used.

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  2. Well, you're certainly on to something. And there's a lot of new research coming out every day about this stuff. I'm sure we could use a lot more (hint,hint...).

    I suppose we're only limited by our IT capabilities at this point. But we should definitely explore online, "on-call" tutoring, podcasting, and whiteboard applications. I wonder what all those would look like across the disciplines.

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