Blog #8

The future of education with technology is very essential to my future as an educator and my students futures, eventually the future of this country. What seems to be becoming more popular in newer and more advanced, "green" schools is online textbooks and/or ebooks. Saving paper and natural resources by not having to print out hundreds of thousands or even millions of textbooks and classroom books could save millions or billions of trees around the country and the world. Our future is focused on becoming environmentally friendly and therefore why these online textbooks have become so important to new and upcoming schools. Although I personally would rather have a paper book in my hands over one online because of how I was raised, the students starting with these books in elementary school won't know the difference. I believe these new textbooks ARE our future, and if it helps our depleting planet, I am more than happy to oblige.

The digital divide is the difference between students or people who do have internet access and technological devices and those who do not. I am on the side who does have technology, I personally have a laptop, an iPhone, a kindle fire, and other smaller devices between my parents and I. In the podcast it talks about the difference between the two students, most people forget about the difference between the two students because most students are like Student A. Even educators like me forget about Student B, this will effect my classroom and my assignments greatly depending on the area I teach in and how many Student A's and B's I have in the current class. If I have more students on the less fortunate side of the divide I will assign all online assignments in class and only paper assignments for home.

The new skills I learned during the powerpoint assignment was how to record my voice on each slide. Before this assignment I had no idea you could actually record your own voice and put it on the slides, I did know audio options were available. What I did not like about the assignment was hearing my own voice on the slides, it was weird hearing myself teach! But what I did like was the opportunity to be creative, choosing whatever I wanted to go on each slide and whatever information I'd like as well. Next time I will improve by providing more information and maybe practicing what I wanted to say more before I recorded myself!