Friday, December 4, 2009

Keeping up with emerging technologies


It is amazing how through the study of this course we have come up with so many new technologies thanks to the web 2.0. Besides Internet, we have now seen how mobile utilities have been getting themselves into the new era of teaching, new technologies like Portable Play Station (PSP), I Touch, I Phone, personal digital agendas, mini lap tops, and so on have become part personal belongings of our lives, just like the keys of our home. So the question of how to cope with so many new technologies has come to our mind, but before this question what we should ask ourselves is if we should keep up to date with so many new emerging technologies.

Regarding the latter questioning, I believe that our students are the ones that answer this every time they bring new technological tools to school. As teachers we must be very updated because we have seen how every new technology has become a great utility for our classes. We must be engaged with our teaching practice and stop trying to avoid every time we see new devices in our classroom, so instead of prohibiting our students of bringing these new devices, we should learn from them and think how we could integrate it into the classroom. So in order to keep up to date with all the new emerging technologies we must look into our students and ask them to teach us what is coming to our lives, and how this can help us improve our practice. Also, we can read articles about new technological advances in order to know what to expect with so many new gadgets that are becoming more and more part of our everyday life.

In regards to the new programs and websites that are updating our use of technology in our classrooms, I believe that the best thing we can do is join CoPs, where we can see what teachers around the world are doing in their classes. Also a great help for our us to keep updated in the new tools of the Internet is using an online book marking service, this allows us to keep track of so many websites that can help us to improve our use of technology in our classrooms. So every time we go into the huge world of the Internet and we surf around it for hours looking for new ways to improve our practice we must keep a diary where we write what we found interesting and how we could use it in order to keep our students motivation for learning.

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