I am doing this "thing" out of order because I can do it with no help! :) As I was looking through my reader, I found two things of interest to me. One was a post about the importance of building relationships with students. PreK Secret to Success: Give me relationship The writer of this post has a very informal voice and really does a nice job of discussing how important these relationships are to students and teachers. I love getting to know my students and showing an interest in their lives. My favorite thing is when we can have humor in the classroom. Most years, I have been fortunate to have classes that, for the most part, the students could engage in appropriate humor with me. Since I teach younger children, it takes some doing to make sure they understand there are limits and a time to "get serious." But when they and I can all enjoy the humor in a situation, it really seems to bring out a whole new side to them. I think it allows them to see another side to me, too and maybe it can serve to motivate them to want to work harder for me when they have to.
Another post dealt with textbooks and basically asked the question, "Are textbooks obsolete?" Are Traditional Textbooks Dead? I, for one, certainly hope they are not. While I think that technology certainly complements the value of textbooks, it should not replace them. I hope there will always be a need and desire for real, physical books that we can touch and feel. I know that with new hand-held devices we can pretty much take virtual books anywhere we can take traditional books, but scrolling down a tiny screen is just not the same as turning the pages of a book. Browsing in a bookstore among aisles of books and other people just can't be replaced by surfing the internet alone.
A lot of the other items that were in my reader seemed to me to very intellectual in nature and a lot of it just doesn't seem relevant to me. I will need to spend more time looking around and finding items that I think can benefit me.
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I agree with you about textbooks. It would be a travesty to lose a physical book that you can touch, highlight, manipulate. I think of Farenheit 451 and how books were illegal. With the technology that is available, are we moving in that direction? However the positive of having a textbook online is that the information can always be updated. I teach a class that is based on the current research in many subjects and the textbook in a year is out-of-date. Do you think there is anyway technology could become the next textbook?
ReplyDeleteThe limitations of textbooks getting out of date quickly in this age of ever-changing information are very real. That is why I believe that there needs to be both, textbooks and online supplements. I used to be a librarian for numerous law firms downtown. Law books have to be updated constantly. Publishers would send updated pages and inserts and we would go in and replace old pages with the new ones. I would think that certain books would lend themselves to this type of updating (but online) very nicely. For example, government/history books could have yearly or even biannual online updates. Books such as English and Spelling don't really need that kind of up-to-the-minute revision. I hope there will always be both in my lifetime.
ReplyDeleteThere is already a site called Curriki, which is an online "textbook". You'll learn more about that when you learn about wikis...In the meantime, take a look:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome