Post #8: Future Technology, Digital Divide, & PowerPoint

Future Technology

I think that the Personal Learning Environment is the most promising new technology for education because it can be used for almost any subject or age level. I think that creating online content through programs such as Moodle to is a good way for students to express their creativity and process information in the way that they learn best.

Digital Divide

The digital divide is the lack of access that some people have to technology such as computers and Internet access at home. I have always had access to technology such as computers and the Internet at home because my family is middle class and we lived in an urban area where having technology was the norm. However, as a teacher I cannot expect all of my students to have the same access to technology that I did growing up. I need to be aware that some of my students may not have a computer at home and make accommodations for those students, such as giving them time on the media center to work on research projects.

PowerPoint

I learned some useful skills from the PowerPoint for Information Dissemination assignment. One of the biggest new things I learned about PowerPoint was the master slide editor, which allows you to make your own custom templates to use throughout your presentation. This is really useful to make all the slides look more uniform, especially if there's a lot of elements like shapes and text boxes on each slide. I also didn't know that you could record your voice on PowerPoint. This is a cool feature because it would allow a teacher to upload a complete lecture with voice explanation instead of just the slides. I think it would be really cool if more online classes utilized this feature. 

I also stepped outside my comfort zone for this project. I want to be a high school English teacher, but after looking over many standards I decided to do my presentation on a fifth grade science standard. The English standards for high school seemed way too broad or complicated for this project, but the elementary science standards seemed narrow enough to be thoroughly explained in about ten slides. 

In my actual subject and age level, I could see myself using PowerPoint presentations to show discussion questions on the books my class is reading. Many of my English teachers in the past also used PowerPoint for quiz questions and grammar lessons, which I can see myself doing.