Final Reflection: Blogging & Virtual Environments

When I first enrolled myself into this class I believed it to be something much different than what it was. I thought that this was going to be a class about different types of technologies that we could use in our classrooms solely for the students use. I am happy to say that I was wrong. I realized after seeing everything the first day that this was going to be a class where I could learn something valuable to take with me into my own classroom someday. All of the projects that we did showed me a lot, I was doing things with programs I had never used before and never portrayed as being useful to me. Again, I was wrong. All of the projects and topics we covered brought me into a new light about technology. I have always seen pros and cons to different technologies, but never talked about it in depth or gotten many different opinions all at once. I found this awesome to be able to see different people’s opinions about a certain topic and they would bring up things I had never even thought of before.
Writing our blogs over the course of this quarter really made me think about different technologies that frankly I did not know anything about. The first topic we covered, that I found very interesting was blogging. Right when I saw that we were going to talk about blogging I thought of personal websites that people go on to talk about themselves. Of course after reading a few article about blogging in the classroom I have found out that blogging can be much more than just writing about yourself on a random website you have created. Blogging can be a very beneficial tool to incorporate into the classroom. It has so many great uses for the teacher and the student. As a teacher I would be able to blog every day or week about what my students are doing and/or learning and have it accessible to the parents.
Another great aspect of blogging is making use of it for the students. There are many programs available that are password protected to make blogging a safe environment for the students, which was one of my biggest worries. My favorite aspect of blogging in the classroom is that it creates a type of equality among the students. They would each be able to write their own opinions on a subject, even the shy kids that may not want to talk about what they think in the normal classroom setting get a chance. In a way I think that blogging would be a way to bring those shy students out of their shells. The more and more they did blogging maybe the more they would feel confident in voicing their opinion about a subject or confident to answer a question in class. Again, I would want my students to do this in a controlled environment that is not accessible to all on the internet, rather would be password protected so that just our class could get on it or password protected through the school itself.
The topic of virtual environments was another interesting subject that we covered. I am not a strong believer that learning through a virtual environment is the way to go. I at the same time think that it could be practical in few instances. To take away the face to face meeting of a student and a teacher in earlier education would take a lot more away than just learning subject matter in the school setting. Furthermore, it would take away all the very important social learning that goes on when being in that school setting. After being through my K-12 years the most important aspect of that time in my life that has stayed with me is the growing I did as an individual. I was able to see after time who I was, and see what I liked and did not like about different social environments. This is not to say that I am still not learning about myself now, in college, but if schools were to go to being all virtually based how is a student suppose to realize who they really and truly are from an avatar. I believe virtual environments promote people to be something that they really are not. With that all said I do see some benefit to having virtual environments in higher education beyond high school. Having virtual schooling for those that a traditional college life just does not fit into theirs is a great option. This allows those that would never be able to attend a school traditionally the option to still seek a college education. This idea gives people more leeway with their life, meaning that they would be able to work and go to school more easily. Having a virtual class would make it possible for those enrolled to work on class work at their convenience. Again, I do not see how this type of learning could ever take the place of the teacher to student interaction.
I along with others do have my strong opinions about all the different technologies discussed throughout the quarter. I am very thankful to get to see what other opinions are on the subjects, I value these opinions and some of the time they even convinced me otherwise. I can not wait to start my career as a teacher and be able to bring aspects that I have learned from this class into my own classroom someday.