Digital Badge C

Photo credit to Holtsman on Flickr

I'm glad that I read the opening story for Chapter 3, because I realized that I probably would have felt equally as unprepared to answer the question from the parent, "What can you teach with technology that you cannot teach just as well without it?" Later on the same page it discussed how technology is transforming education in five major areas: critical thinking and problem solving, digital literacies, electronic communications and collaborations, creativity, and digital citizenship. The photo above shows a class with iPods with camera capabilities outside doing a project. In the same photo album there were pictures of the kids photographing many things around a park they were at, and it seems like that is something that you cannot do without technology! Coming up with fun little projects for the students to do with things as simple as cameras can really help them grow in those five major areas with the use of technology. This motivates me to think more about incorporating technology into lesson plans or transforming the lesson to fit technology usage.

The other two concepts that I enjoyed were the learning theories. Mostly Behaviorism and Constructivism. They were all interesting, but I enjoyed these two the most.

Behaviorism is interesting because it says that people learn due to changes in their environment. The textbook says that this means that learning is a process of memorizing, demonstrating and imitating. There is a study where a boy was introduced to a rat so many times and a bad thing happened each time, so from then until he died he was extremely frightened of little white rats. I think this is an interesting concept with technology because students would basically learn what the computer put in front of them, and demonstrate it and imitate it. I personally feel that learning with technology should be more entertaining and interactive, hence why I enjoyed the constructivism learning theory. Constructivism states that people interpret and build their own world around them based on the knowledge they receive. This means that student learning with computers and technology is based on their own actions and responses. I think that this encourages creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, and other major areas of learning. Learning with technology should be viewed from a constructivism learning theory view point.




Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.