Interactivity #1: Technology as Autobiography

Due: 5:00pm EST Wednesday, February 20

Before teachers can think about the professional and pedagogical uses of technology, we need to first understand our own personal relationships to these communications technologies, since they mediate our lives on a daily basis.

Step 1: Identify and ranking the THREE most influential communications technologies in your life up to this point. Think carefully.You can only pick three. Write them down. You'll come back to them later.

Step 2: View the video "Olivia's Story" (7:26) from the George Lucas Educational Foundation. It provides one perspective of a young person's relationship to technology and how it shapes her various experiences with formalized education and her daily life in general. Take some notes on how Olivia might resemble students that you will be teaching in New Jersey. What is important for you, as a teacher, to know about Olivia's relationship to and uses of technology?

Step 3: View the video "Learning to Change, Changing to Learn" (4:23)
from the Consortium for School Networking. Pay careful attention to how and why these young people use technology to learn.

Step 4: Go back to your list of the 3 most influential communications technologies. Reflect upon how these technologies have shaped your own life for better and for worse:

• How, if at all, have any of the three technologies impacted the ways in which you learn new information?
• What are the similarities and differences between your uses of those 3 most influential technologies as compared to the uses of technologies among the young people from these 2 videos?

The evidence of your work on which you will be assessed for this first assignment is a blog post on your own blogspot (maximum 750 words) that addresses the questions and ideas shaded in red above. For a review of blogging criteria [click here].