Thing 21: YouTube and More

I just watched a video on TeacherTube by Rachel Boyd from Nelson, New Zealand on why we should let our students blog. My first reaction when watching this was--these students look like they are in first grade; they are just lil'uns! How do they know how to type or write yet, let alone blog? If they are blogging, well, there is a lot of learning going on in that classroom.

I wonder how much technology is too much technology in the classroom? How much use of it will take away from the basic core of what I want my students to learn? Everything takes time to teach and that is something that seems to be eaten away at all the time, with unexpected pep rallies, state testing that seems to multiple, more, more, more, which leaves classroom teachers with less, less, less.

Yes, I want my students to have the skills to negotiate the turns of technology. I also want them to be able to write beautiful and eloquent essays, read literature that will change their perspectives of the world, and be critical thinkers. How do you pick and choose what you'll throw out of the curriculum to add new pieces while teaching time seems to be ebbing every year?

Now, on a lighter note--TeacherTube has many interesting features. One of them is called BrainPOP, which is a curriculum-based site focused on students from third to twelfth grade featuring movies (more than 600) and then has activities that go along with them. I don't think I would use this enough to warrant the fee, but I think it is interesting that it is searchable based state standards tools.

Another video I watched on TeacherTube was one called "Have you been paying attention?" It talks about the value of using technology to teach keeping their learning styles in mind. It asks the question "How much richness does your curriculum provide?" I watched this video twice actually. The statistics are interesting, the ideas were definitely out of the normal teaching framework. I am left with these questions: Can teachers that are not as technologically savvy as their students improve the "richness" of the curriculum by using technology? Doesn't one have to be an expert? How does one become an expert when one is not a native speaker of that language, a wanderer in that world, and you don't have language brain?

The last video I will address here is called "Did you know? 2.0" The video states that "In ten years, it is predicted that the country that will be the number one speaker of English will be China" and "there were more than 2.7 billion searches on Google--this month." That is a lot of information (that might not be reliable) to have been accessed. How about the fact "that if MySpace was a country, it would be the 8th largest in the world"? That is a lot of social networking! It must be working though, since the video also stated that 1 in 8 marriages in 2005 started by meeting on the Internet.

This video then directed the viewer to go to the wiki: shifthappens.wikispaces.com to join the conversation for "everyone must be involved in the conversation if we are to come up with a system of education for our children that prepares them for the 21st century" (shifthappens.wikispaces.com). The video really made me think about how I teach students. I don't know how I will be able to change my teaching, how much I will be able to change, or how fast, but at least I am thinking about it. The video also quoted Albert Einstein, which is how I will end this entry tonight: "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."