Tag Pens All the Rage!

Recently in the past few years, the hottest trend both at home and in the classroom in helping to read are Leap Frog's Tag Reading Pens. They are "pens" with a stainless steel tip or ball point, with a small infrared camera that reads infrared dots on pages of books. The pens can do everything from helping the child sound out  a word, sound, or read an entire sentence. At the actual Leap Frog site teachers can get ideas for technology Leap Frog provides to use in their classroom. I have talked to numerous teachers in the elementary grades, who say that these pens and other things offered by Leap Frog are an inspiration to children when it comes to learning how to read in the classroom. Technology is something that is a fun learning tool for students, and at times reading isn't something that sounds fun for the students to do. By using technology, these students are getting excited about learning how to read!

Hooray for assistive technology!

Throughout my years of school, I have had the pleasure of being able to help and work with students who need assistance in the classroom. I tend to forget how lucky and fortunate I am to be able to learn efficiently and on my own in school. When I watched the video "Assistive-Technology: Enabling Dreams", I realized just how important technology in the classroom is to those students who depend on it to learn to their fullest potential. This video shows much insight to children who use assistive technology every day in their classrooms. Things are better put into perspective I feel when they have a personal spin on them, and actually seeing a child be able to participate in class by the use of something like the device that is able to communicate words and sentences to a teacher from a student who only has the mobility of his eyebrows on his entire body. It is truly fascinating, what has come about to help these students and make them feel comfortable in the classroom. Technology is something that definitely gets better in time, with people coming up with new ideas every day!

PCs in the classroom!

After watching a video we watched for Ed. Tech. and Design, I began to think about personal computers in the classroom. The video was made by PBS, and discussed the potential positives and negatives of students essentially living their lives online. Some of the stories that were told in this video were quite haunting. While there were some schools who adopted using personal computers in their classrooms, some of those schools put strict restrictions or "blockers" on what the kids couldn't see, so they wouldn't be surfing the web when they should be doing an assignment for their teacher. The teacher would be teaching out loud to the students, but also at the same time posting things in their virtual classroom that the students also had to respond to. The administrators however, were able to use a camera of some sort, to tap into the students' computers and literally see what they were doing. Some images showed the sites the students were viewing, or their actual faces of whether or not they were paying attention in class. I found this a bit disturbing, because I find it an invasion of privacy. Where I think the teachers and administrators have a right to see what the children are doing on their computers, I also don't think it's right that they are able to spy on the kids as closely as they are.

I think technology in the classroom in the form of personal computers is a wonderful idea! I think it gives the kids life skills early on that they will need being able to operate a computer functionally. I think monitoring of the students is needed especially if the students have access to the internet, and things like cyber-bullying should be discussed with the students before they are able to use the computers on their own.