Week Three

I think the most useful thing I was introduced to this week was Rubistar. I'd heard of the program before and was already signed up for it, but I hadn't actually explored the site yet. But now that I see what the site actually encompasses, I believe it will be an asset for the classroom. Having just the template designed would almost be enough help in itself, but there is also so much information already put in there for individual assignments or in general. You can easily take a rubric that already exists and use just that, or you can add to it and mold it to make it fit your specifications. I will certainly use this program in the classroom anything to make my life a little easier! I can definitely have students create their own rubrics with it as well, either to use on someone else or for someone else to use on them.
I think students in my classroom may have experienced technology differently than me on either end of the spectrum. In some places, like the school I worked at previously, technology was not financially available to a large portion of the school, and therefore their technology, and especially computer use, was limited only to what we did in school and therefore I was the technological God to many students. On the flip side, the school where I work now, the average student has probably at least one computer at home, a cell phone better than mine in their backpacks, an iPod in their pocket and GPS in their cars, thus meaning that their technological experience is far above average. These students can't remember a time when they didn't have all these new, advanced piece of technology and so they count on them more than some. I can look back and remember a time when I didn't have a computer in the classroom for student use, when I didn't have one at home, when I didn't have a cell phone and a boom box with batteries was my only source of portable music. Students are just surrounded by technology at a much younger age and are therefore taking it for granted more than the generations before them. I think this changes learning because while it IS vital for them to learn new technologies and harness that power for good, it's also important for them to be able to survive without technology. And by that I mean, they should be able to handwrite, spell without a spell checker, save their friends numbers in a phone book in case their phone dies, do math without a calculator, etc.
A perfect example of this is found in this weeks reading:

“Now, when I make a mistake, I
don’t use an eraser or rewrite the
whole paper. My handwriting is
messy, but with the computer my
paper looks really nice.”
—1984, John, Grade 3, Apple2e
48K, Bank Street Writer
(page 4)

Once computers started to come along students began to give up on hand writing and just type everything. It makes me think about my own experience with writing. My younger brother and I are only three years apart and my mom always comments on how handwriting got lost somewhere right around his level in elementary school. In 3rd and 4th, and even some 2nd grades, I was taught handwriting, and cursive was a main focus but by the time my brother hit those same grades, only 3 years later, writing was no longer a focus and they began to do more typing. It was something I saw in 6th grade with an amazingly technologically inclined teacher, but to this day my brother can't write worth a lick because he was never TAUGHT how. I think it's turning around to some extent now, at least in the classrooms I have witnessed, but it's entirely individual based on the teacher.