EduTech

After watching the video on the effect of technology on children, I am torn between siding with the mother who encourages technology use and with the father who is keeping his kids away from it. In my own personal experience, I have babysat for two young boys for the past three years who both have heavily used iPads. This past January, their parents realized just how addicted these boys were to their iPads. It was impossible to get them off the get in the shower, come eat dinner, etc. so the parents told them they could only have their iPad's on the weekends. The first week of them being iPad free was both hilarious and scary. They seemed very lost, as if they didn't know what to do with themselves when they came home from school. One of the boys cried a few times that week because he bored, and even had a full-on temper tantrum about it. A few months later, they have adjusted pretty well and it is so great to see that instead of flying to their bedroom's after school and...

Link to Vizia After viewing the video for Vizia, I think that it is something that could definitely be useful in a classroom setting. Vizia allows you to put questions into the middle of a video, which could be a great way to check student comprehension and it also can help to keep students watching rather than them doodling, texting, or putting their heads down. This could be an incentive or a form of motivation for them to pay attention to the video to earn points or an easy grade-raiser if a teacher decides to count it towards something. Overall, I think Vizia would be a great addition to any classroom!

This rubric is used for schools and teachers to make sure that they are integrating technology into their classrooms and lessons in an effective way. Some important things for teachers to keep in mind when planning to integrate technology into their lessons is: Make sure that the instruction plan of integrating technology lines up with the curriculum goals. If it doesn't, it makes introducing this technology useless. Make sure that the technology being used will support instructional strategies. Make sure that the technology is can appropriately help teach the topic at hand. Make sure that all the aspects fit well together when including technology. If not all of these are met, this could lead to teachers wasting valuable time if the technology they are integrating doesn't fit into what they are trying to teach.

Link to Video I enjoyed Robinson's video on changing education paradigms. One thing that he spoke significantly about was the ADHD "epidemic" and how it is fictitious. Growing up, my mother always said the same thing and frowned when she heard that my friends were on Ritalin, the medication for ADHD. On the contrary, my fiance and his four brothers were all on Ritalin for most of their childhoods. While their mother swears that it helped them, my fiance always told me how much he hated being on that medication. He has told me that he felt like he was a different person, he never really had an appetite and it made him very skinny, at one time to the point where he looked sick. I strongly agree with Robinson that this is a fictitious epidemic and that the answer is not to pump with drugs but rather to seek other alternatives so that we don't have kids walking around like zombies.