Chapter 2

One of the focus questions that really caught my attention in the beginning of the chapter was Focus Question 2: "In what ways does technology promote unique, powerful, and transformation learning for students?"
In last weeks class, Introduction to Technology for educators, we watched a Youtube video on how technology can help students as well as teachers in their academics. The video clip demonstrated text messaging your students, as a teacher to make "pop quizzes" or as group messages for assignments. As a third year college student at Edison State College, I have never came upon something like this, I have never even thought about it due to the fact that while I attended Elementary, Middle and High, I was brought up believing that using any types of electronics in class was considered rude and disrespectful. Learning that technology is one of the best ways to reach out to anybody, imagine all the possible things we can all learn, if we are using it properly.

This course has given me a new perspective on how electronics can help our education as teachers and as well as students, technology can promote, unique, powerful and transformations in leaning for students. Not all students learn the same way, one may be a visual learner while the student sitting near by may be a an auditory learner. Visual learners learn from having the images, objects in front of them or hands on. Technology would benefit this student by being able to reinforce the ideas he/she may have just read by making a PowerPoint presentation or writing a blog about the lecture, and being able to express him/herself by posting pictures on the blog.  Allowing the student to be creative in their own way using technology allows them to grow academically as well as within themselves.

In this chapter I came across " A New Science of Learning" in this page I was reading how the teacher took her students outside at different times of the day to draw the students shadow on the cement. Each time the students went out they would trace their shadows in different color chalk and be able to determine how the shadows "change" their size according to the position of the sun.
In this experiement, the teacher was explaining to her students that the Earth is the one that moves around the sun, even though it seems as the Earth is "still."

As a teacher, I would like to do a similar experiment with my students but I would also like to reinforce the idea with a presentation on the computer. Using technology to be able to reinforce the idea, as well as outside of the classroom.
I would let them take pictures of their shadow traces and upload them to the computer and make a slideshow with animations of the Earth rotating around the sun, for my students to get the visual of what it is that happens while their shadow is the one that looks like is lengthening and shrinking.
 At the end of this chapter I wanted to make an awesome word cloud with the words that I had read as well as words and tools that I had thought of throughout typing my blog.
Using Wordle.net (thank you professor Coleman) I made this really neat word cloud!