Blog Post 3

A Vision of Students Today:

“A Vision of Students Today” was filmed in the spring of 2007 by an Anthropology class at Kansas State University. This video focuses on the current problems students have today. These problems are things like students who go to class but spend their time on Facebook and other Internet sites rather than learn the material being taught. Another problem is that students are spending tons of money to go to college and then they do not show up to class because it isn’t required. I believe that a point that this video is trying to make is that students do not make the most of their money and time that they spend in college. If you are paying for a good, not to mention expensive, education you should make the most of it and actually get the education you deserve instead of wasting your valuable time and money.
The second focus of this video was to make people aware of how technology really affects our everyday lives. A study was taken by 200 students to calculate how much time they spend doing specific activities each day. The students that completed the study spent on average almost 27 hours a day on technology. The fact that between the Internet, Facebook, listening to music, talking on the phone, texting, and other daily activities, students are spending 26 ½ hours per day just goes to show how technology is affecting our lives. Things that use to not exist have now been invented and unless you are a multi-tasker there just aren’t enough hours in the day to be able to fit in all of the activities of students’ everyday lives.
I do feel that this video is accurate. The estimates of how much time students spend on technology instead of inside of a book. I can say for myself that I spend hundreds of dollars on books each semester and still use the Internet to do my homework. I feel like get so caught up in their job they forget their real purpose sometimes. I believe that forming relationships with your students is extremely important and I am lucky to have small class sizes to where most of my teacher knows me by face and name. The one thing in this video that I couldn’t relate to was the fact that students had over 100 classmates in their class. At the University of South Alabama I believe our average class size is about 25-30.

“It’s Not About the Technology” by Kelli Hines

In Ms. Hines blog she states four important qualities the each teach must possess in order to be an effective teacher that portrays a positive impact on her students.
These four things are:
1. Teachers must also be active learners
2. Learning and Teaching are not the same thing
3. Without good teaching technology loses a lot of its purpose
4. If you can teach effectively without technology then you can teach effectively with it but that statement does not work both ways.
To have an effective education system we need good teachers. Good teachers must be good learners. Ms. Hines points out that if no learning is happening in the classroom it is simply because no teaching is going on. I believe that the point she was trying to make is that technology can be a useful tool in 21st century learning but it is not the only tool. More important than advanced technology is advanced teachers. Teachers who know the importance of education and learning and how to make learning happen instead of pounding facts in to a student’s head long enough for them to pass the test. She says it is not about having a Smart Board in the classroom but about how that teacher can use that Smart Board to intrigue her students.


“Is it Okay to be a Technologically Illiterate teacher” by Karl Fisch

In Karl Fisch’s blog he states multiple times “If a teacher today is not technologically literate - and is unwilling to make the effort to learn more - it's equivalent to a teacher 30 years ago who didn't know how to read and write.” This could be considered to be a harsh statement but I believe it is 100 percent true. If our teachers are not technologically literate how will they ever teach our students how to be tech-savvy so to speak? Within the next decade I believe that many schools will have resulted to classroom work online and all classrooms will have Smart Boards for example. If a teacher is not technologically literate how will he/she teach his/her students to survive in a world that is resulting to everything being technological? I think it would be an unfair disadvantage to students to have a teacher that was not technologically literate. As for the teachers who have been in the system for years and never felt the need to catch up with the latest technology they should be trained so that they can be persuasive in the classroom
I do agree that it is an embarrassment to brag about being technologically illiterate. Although I do feel that being technologically literate is important it is also almost impossible because technology changes every day. With the rate that technology is changing there is no way to tell what the world will be like within the next decade but what I do know is that technology is here to stay and is only becoming more advanced each and every day.

Gary Hayes Social Media Count


The picture above goes to show how fast technology is moving. It is one of those things where everything happens so fast that once you're behind it's going to hell trying to catch back up. Technology is a significant part of life in the 21st century and as educators we need to be up to par with being tech-savvy because if not, our students will fall behind and never catch up either.