compare and contrast veiws of technology in college students vs. K-12 students

Technology in the college setting versus it's application within the K-12 setting varies greatly. I think the issue of technological savvy and literacy in the K-12 setting is really an issue of time, resources, and lack of teachers adequately trained and able in using and discovering new useful technologies for pedagogy. As more knowledge is gathered and more technology is available for use, expecially if a school district is trying to embrace all of these new ideas and technologies, it spreads the staff and curriculum thinner and thinner. This is not to say that new ideas should not be embraced, but school districts must re-evaluate how much they are actually able to teach and what is worth while to teach both from a curriculum standpoint and a applied technologies standpoint. Obviously, this is difficult to do with technology because it is constantly evolving--what was relevent software to know today may be obsolete a week later.
Technology in the university is obviously much more prevelent, used and appreciated, but the question is for what purpose? Most students use the technological resources around them to do several things primarily; keep up with friends(facebook), communicate(skype etc..), and access free information (sometimes) and media(much more prevalent). Often times, obviously it depends on the area of study, technology is much more prevelent in our recreation time than in our academic time and, much like the k-12 situation, the technology we learn to use today may or may not(most likely the latter) be relevent in our careers due to the creation of more useful things.
It is ironic that it seems that technology is often used too often as a distractor in a university students life, versus used for academic purposes. while it is not used enough in the k-12 curriculum, due to lack of knowledge of relevent applications. Clearly, at both levels the usefulness of technology ought to be further embraced, hopefully resulting in further cultivation of our k-12 students ability to use the internet and find relevent items as a means to increase productive use at the college level.

Internet Communication

Internet communication has changed life for all of us who live in the information age and have access to a computer. Personally, I am a believer that for as many good things that the internet has provided us in terms of free information there is obviously a downside. It seems likely to me that the demise of man as a species will arise from one of three things; overpopulation, global disaster, or over reliance on technology. Surely the internet is a great tool to be used in the classroom and everyday life for accessing information but I think it should be strongly suggested that it be used for relatively productive purposes as I am sure current research shows a drop in productivity as more of our time is spent mindlessly searching and maintaining through our virtual lives. Technology as life changing and useful as the internet and the applications and sites currently popular, facebook etc, should be used with caution as one can easily lose themselves and the joy of actually experiencing life versus just watching it on their screen through over and unnecessary use.

"Show Me Missouri's Temperatures"

The objective of this lesson was to integrate multiple subject matters into an activity concerning temperatures amongst some of Missouri's cities. The instructor begins the lesson by introducing the students to some classical music and asking her students what the music, appropriately titled by the names of the four seasons, inspires their minds to consider. Next, she creates a KWL (know, wonder, learn) chart before showing a short video about weather changes. The student's then look on the internet as a class to gather temperature readings and, ultimately, enter their data into an excel spreadsheet to create graphs and determine the average temperatures in five Missouri cities. At the end of their lesson, the class returns to their KWL chart and goes through the questions that they wondered about to answer them with what they learned through completing the activity.

I particularly enjoyed the way this teacher made the information relevant to the individuals in her classroom by completing the KWL chart and directing their studies towards the questions the students wondered about. Also, it was impressive how effectively she managed to integrate multiple disciplines along with technology. My only criticisms would be the students not gathering their internet data independently, weather information is not difficult to find, and the instructor easily could have helped students independently that were having trouble or presented them with websites to visit. This would have also helped them learn techniques for independent internet research and contributed to the authenticity of the activity.

Hungerford's Technology and Business lesson

This lesson entails students using software that allows students to manage the price of their products and observe the effect that changing the price of a product has on a consumer demand curve and, ultimately, the revenue, profits, net worth, and other aspects of their company. Along with this Mr. Hungerford also has the students create much of the information that a real corporation would have to disclose including stock holder reports, profit reports, and spreadsheets and graphs of product information. All of this supports students in expanding their record keeping ability and software use skills. I would assert that the strength of this lesson was the real world applicability that the software and instruction provides while still being relatively simple and user friendly with their graph and spreadsheet interface, in the same breath, I would comment that this is perhaps the weakness of the assignment as well. We all know how frustrated we got the first time we tried to do cell functions in excel with little to no success and alot of frustration, sadly, until computers can read minds, this is a big part of the learning curve of the information age.

Aunthenticity of News Broadcast lesson

The authenticity of this lesson is supported primarily by being extremely student centered and relevant to current technologies. There was very little teacher involvement outside of the initial setup for the activity. Student's who had more experience in producing the newscast explained and assisted students that were new to the process; resulting in a more effective academic experience for all. During the production of the broadcast the students were exposed to word processing technology, video and video editing technology, and cinematography skills--all of which give these students a large head start in the process of learning to use and effectively utilize the technology available to them. Student-centered and student led learning make this lesson effective throughout. In my opinion, this is one of the best elementary lesson's I have ever seen in action. I am doubtful that the activity initially went as smoothly as the video demonstrates, but getting young students to work nearly independently towards a goal, and keep their interest in it, is impressive.