Friday, February 5, 2010

Technology for now and the future

I think the most useful site that I accessed in class was the edutopia website. This site was instantly appealing and laid out very easy to acess and understand which is important for eduactors who dont have alot of tiem to sort through information to sources that are valuable.

I liked that this site had blogs that were easy to access and held so much valuable insights and information about teaching and technology!

Monday, February 1, 2010

Book to Movie...how do teachers make it work?

Sitting in the Movie, "When In Rome" this past weekend, watching the previews for the two new Nicolas Sparks movies, adaptions from his books; it occurred to me that teachers have to very carefully factor lessons around the books that are made into films.
Teaching novels in schools is something that will continue to happen as books continue to be the main building blocks of English teaching. But the film makers have also had an influence on the content, material, and understanding of many of these novels. The debate is still open if film supplements are good for teaching content or if teachers should just stick to the text. I know many teachers who brag that they didn't show a single film of a novel, and others who pride themselves on showing students all film, audio, and texts available for that subject.

As a new teacher in the training, you have to wonder where film and media will fit into our teaching curriculum in the future, are we being trained to include these new important mediums, or are we simply being taught to ignore them? I think students will always be on the cutting edge of things like media and film, and therefore teachers should be on the cutting edge too. Just as we are in this computer class, teachers in training should be learning how to include film correctly, how to teach students the benefit of reading, and then the benefit of supplementing with film or media.