My Thinking about My Work-Making My Blog

It was my first time to make a blog. At first, it was somewhat difficult to create my own blog but later I was being fascinated by making my own blog. I am sure that the experience of making my blog would make a difference for my future teaching because sharing and posting opinions between teachers and students via a blog would be a democratic and effective way of scaffolding meaningful communications. After creating my blog, I got to know that technology could be an important social venue where teachers can encourage critical, creative, and cooperative thinking of students beyond classroom settings. In addition, through making and developing their own blogs, students will be able to do self-directed study by their unique purpose and own pace, which would contribute to increasing their self-efficacy. To me, It was a really cool experience to make my own blog! Definitely It was!

Anyway, I have to go to my boy! Have a good sleep like him.

What I have Learned through the Class 2 (9/13)

From Reading
"Technologies should be used as knowledge construction tools that students learn with, not from." (p. 24) I like the concept-Mindtools. Students use technologies with critical thinking, and the technologies help them as learning strategies. It seemed to me that the mechanism between learners and technologies as Mindtools are so cooperative learning in educational setting. In my teaching experiences, frequently I've made mistakes confusing the important reasons why I use technologies in my classroom. My children loved to do computers, and I just let them enjoy computer programs, not engaged them with critical thinking. I mean, I did not encourage my students to think deeply and critically at all when they used computers in the classroom. Therefore, one of the important points I've learned from the article is that I need to teach my students to have intellectual partnership between computers and learners themselves.

From Concept Mapping-Inspiration
Unfortunately, I've got to know about myself that I am not a person who has very systematic knowledge or plentiful ideas about something after trying to develop my concept map with Inspiration. Well, Inspiration is really cool program and I know my kids would love it. However, my problem was caused by lacking of ideas about my concept, not caused by using a new technology. Even though the program, Inspiration helped my ideas look so cool, it was not enough to encourage my critical thinking about my concept at first. To be honest, I could make just three nodes because ideas did not come out. From the first experience of using Inspiration, I have learned the importance of pre-teaching or pre-thinking(?) activities before just using technologies in my classroom. For example, if I do the pre-activities such as brainstorming, mindmapping about our subjects before developing visual images with Inspiration, I think I would get much better learning effects. Even good technologies themselves can not guarantee everything. It depends on how teachers and learner use them critically, effectively.

After My First Class

I would say that I am not a technological person. So, I definitely need to take this course, Technology Tools for Education. However, on the other hand, it means- I am poor at technology that I am going to be in trouble in this class. And it happened to me at the first class. The first mission of the class was to create a personal blog. It was not easy for me to make the basic frame of my blog. Even it took quite a long time to understand how to post my writing. Anyway, it seemed that the class would be a good challenge for me to develop my confidence and practical skills about technology and multimedia.

I hope that the class, Technology Tools for Education will be well balanced between theory beyond technology and practice for developing practical technology skills.

My Research Interest

I am interested in developing a literature based literacy curriculum in an elementary setting. Especially, I am so interested in multicultural literature. I've taught elementary school children in South Korea. From my experiences, I've learned that good quality literature is more than a source of fun for them. It is a central vehicle for exploring who we are as people, as a culture, and as a society. So, I want to find genuine pearls from thousands of children' books and introduce them to my children. That is my study dream.