Orchestrating the Media College

Orchestrating the Media College by Jason Ohler highlighted what I have been experiencing in Mr. Engell’s tech savvy history classes. My mentor teacher’s classes are almost all internet or technology related and he decided that it would be best for me to follow in his footsteps since technology is the future. Although I find it frustrating at times, I am incredibly thankful for this experience. The whole article by Ohler made sense to me since it can be directly applied to my classroom. If I had to take two statements from it that really stood out, they would be:

1) “As student participation goes public, the pressure to produce high-quality work increases.”

and

2) “I have witnessed more digital art taught by computer-savvy teachers than by art teachers.”

Having students post documents to googledocs and collaborating on projects raises the quality of the work immensely. It does cause additional stress to the student but in the end, their grade is higher because of it. It also gives them a chance to help each other out and correct mistakes that might have gone unnoticed.

The second statement also caught my attention because of something my mentor teacher keeps telling me. He says that he never thought of himself as an artistic person until he started embracing technology (mostly videography). It is a medium in which he can express himself and help students to learn. Technology is a tool that students want to use to learn.

One major problem that I have had with students using technology is keeping them on task. Having a laptop with internet makes it easy for them to end up doing something other than paying attention to the work. However, this is not the fault of the technology, it is a behavior problem that would probably be manifested as something else if the laptop wasn’t there (ex. note passing, doodling…).

Overall, these are exciting times to be a teacher!