Blog for LAI590

OPINIONS ON DIGITAL NATIVES AND DIGITAL IMMIGRANTS               (MOD#11) One of the videos that I watched stated that "digital natives" are those who were born after 1980 and those who are "digital immigrants are those born prior to 1980. Based on this assumption, I should be considered a "digital native," as I was born in 1990, but I'm not really sure if it is that black and white. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I feel that the digital age was in its infancy. When I was a little kid, the internet was just becoming accessible and I was still playing 16-bit video games. The digital world was still basic. However, nowadays, many people are being born into a world where WIFI is the norm and video games are rendered in near real life graphics with high tech virtual reality gaming coming into prominence. Even though I am a digital native, I feel that many elementary school aged children are actually more capable than me when it comes to technological ...

USING PODCASTS IN MY CLASSROOM:      Podcasts are a series of videos or just audio that are uploaded to a website that anyone can download and view. The content of these podcasts can be about anything. They can be about politics, food, games, new products, the culture of a city, or someone's everyday life. Anyone who is interested in these items can view or listen to the podcasts at anytime from anywhere using a variety of electronic mobile devices.      Because the content of these podcasts is so various they are really useful for education. Odds are, if you are interested in learning something, you can find a relevant podcast to help you. Learning languages is no exception. There are podcasts for learning many languages and the culture of the countries that speak those languages. As a student or a self-learner, they are extremely useful for improving one's language ability and learning about specific elements that are rarely explained in textbooks. As ...

Using Twitter to Enhance One's Teaching:                                                  MOD#6 P2      Before I even read the articles, I began to see the educational use of twitter as I explored it. I created a Twitter account years ago not long after it became extremely popular as I wanted to see what all of the hype was about. However, to my disappointment, there was nothing interesting about it. It was very similar to Facebook, if Facebook didn't have anything but its status bar. At the time, it just seemed like a platform on which to follow celebrities, which I had no interest in. I shortly deleted my account after just creating it and never went back onto the site until recently. I have to say that this is a much different Twitter now than the one I knew all those years ago. It has a new look, and for the purpose of teaching, it is just...

REACTIONS TO VIDEOS FOR MOD#3 I recently watched this video , and there are a few things I would like to say about it. The beginning of the video discussed many of the concepts that we are learning today will be obsolete in the future, so as time goes on, so should the nature of what we teach (I found this especially true for information retrieval skills). In this way we are preparing students and giving them the tools to handle what they will encounter in the future. I really have to agree with this. As time goes on, technology and the needs of our society develop along with it. Many students graduate from high school today without the necessary skills needed to tackle the real world. Implementing this would be difficult and controversial, but we should identify what skills students will need for the future, and what skills will be obsolete, and adjust our curriculum as needed. The second half of the video talked about how we can do this and how we can engage our students in the l...