Comments on Technology and Education Blogs

Hello world,
As I was reading through technology blogs, this post in TeachThought was the first to catch my eye. It's about how students, and young people in general see themselves in the current age. One thing I haven't considered is how differently today's youth see themselves. While in my teenage years I struggled with identity based on which cultures I related to having moved several times in my youth. Todays teen's identities are based on virtual expressions of self. Since teens are very young and without much life experience, a constant expression of self only reaffirms their ego-centrism and denies them of the opportunity to exist in a physical world. This blog post alludes to this loss of physical identity by calling teachers to help students construct an image that is whole. I think this is valuable for us to realize as teachers because we can help students more than ever in a holistic way that is also unprecedented.

In the blog Free Technology 4Teachers, several resources are posted for teachers to create a polling system in their presentations. I think this would be a useful feature to include in my classes. Several of my university lectures used this method to engage students and I thought it was effective. This promotes interaction during the class and can be used to ask opinions, to predict hypotheses, or to test knowledge. No matter what the poll is used for, it increases the participation of each student and reduces the chance that they will get distracted while attention is on a single other person speaking in class.

Although I like all the top posts in Edudemic, the one I want to share is How to Protect Students From Fake News. Most young people get their information from social media these days and will readily believe it. According to the blogs facts from a Stanford study, "82% of surveyed middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between ads and real news on a website". This is great cause for alarm as we could have a naive generation blindly believing the most attention grabbing disputes without knowing how to find facts for themselves. More than many subjects taught in schools in the past, differentiating between facts and fake news is one of the most important skills we can teach our young people. I believe as teachers we have a great responsibility to incorporate this skill into our curriculum, no matter what subject we teach. Students must learn to find real sources on any topic and think critically about what they are reading, searching first for the source of information rather than the most dangerous trap of blindly following what they see.