Saturday, November 5, 2011

Static vs. Dynamic Technologies


I find myself tending to explore more and more dynamic technologies in my courses and with the teachers and students I work with.  The challenge in doing so, as a coach snot assigned to a classroom, is time.  Embedding these dynamic technologies in helping students explore and produce content, communicate with distant learners, and collaborate with peers synchronously and asynchronously is my goal as I hope to return to either a F2F or distance learning teaching position.   Until then I lumber in the midpoint with one foot in dynamic and the other stuck in the static use of technology.  I say this for I coach teachers in the use of technologies, but simply using them does not make them dynamic.  Technologies become dynamic when they are used to promote student production of information, collaboration on products they are creating, and communication among students is self-generated and interactive.  Alone the technologies are all static; we make them dynamic!

3 comments:

  1. Jen,

    I love your continuum concept! The greatest thing about this graphic organizer is seeing how everyone visualizes the concept. I definitely find that yours easy to understand. I agree that we are not really teachers these days as much as we are coaches guiding our students to knowledge. Educators can make any thing dynamic if they take into consideration student's constructing knowledge.

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  2. First of all, I absolutely love your concept map. I’ve never used Prezi before, but will most definitely experiment with it now that I’ve seen an excellent example. Good job on that!

    Next, you say that we (the users) make technologies dynamic by how we use them… Good point... One that I haven’t considered. I haven’t even begun to look at incorporating these media and technologies into my own classroom yet, as I feel as if I’m still learning how to use them as a student myself. I believe that once I become more comfortable and knowledgeable, only then will I consider modeling the use of these media and technologies for my own students. If these media and technology are not enhancing learner’s learning experience, then they are not as beneficial as they could be. Communication, collaboration, and content must be enhanced/advanced because of these media and technologies; otherwise, they aren’t as significant as they have the power to be.

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  3. I find your concept graphic very instructive and the application you used is new to me. Is Prezi the name of this application? How does it work?

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