Key Trend

"The work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature, and there is more cross-campus collaboration between departments. While this trend is not as widespread as the others listed here, where schools have created a climate in which students, their peers, and their teachers are all working towards the same goals, where research is something open even to first year students, the results have shown tantalizing promise. Increasingly, both students and their professors see the challenges facing the world as multidisciplinary, and the need for collaboration great. Over the past few years, the emergence of a raft of new (and often free) tools has made collaboration easier than at any other point in history."

Nice connection to our SUNY System Amanda.  I too appreciate how accessible information is on the system and find it almost maddening when professors do not utilize it to its fullest potential.

In the elementary school setting I imagine it could potentially exist much as it does with the SUNY system.  The district where I am doing my observation has something similar, but I am not positive. I will look into it further and investigate how they use their technological resources in collaboration with each other. 

Alone Together

http://www.npr.org/2011/02/25/134059283/have-we-grown-too-fond-of-technology

This is a link to a program and a book on NPR (National Public Radio) about the social effects of generational technology.
Fodder for debate?

Does Technology Create Collaboration? Or Privacy Concerns?

The first question involves the last "Key Trend" under the readings for week 5. This key trend suggests that technology has created more collaboration between departments on campuses. Do you feel that this is true for our campus? What about for the Elementary level? Does technology create collaboration between subjects or even grades?

A second thing that caught my attention was a statement about privacy concerns in one of the articles that I read. With all of the advances in technology and the encouragement for students to learn electronically, what implications could this have for our students and how can we avoid privacy issues?

Accessiblity

While the Prensky article was not meant to enlighten us to the conditions of poverty it eloquently highlights the need to evaluate how we reach the children of this digital age that the author refers to as digital natives.  I contend that the majority of these "digital natives" are not experiencing conditions of poverty.

Digital Natives

I think that is a great question that you posed about Marc Prensky's article. However, I think that it is most likely that a vast majority of househols have some form of technology--rather it be a TV, DVD player, video game console, computer, or even a cell phone. And for those households with absolutely NO technology, most schools spend a little time with some form of technology each day. Every classroom I have been into in the past few years has had at least one computer, along with access to a large computer lab. I am not saying you are wrong in questioning his generalized statement, I just think that most children do fall under the Digital Natives categories, some are just more involved in technology than others, possibly due to accessibilty.

Here we are

So this is our blog for technology. 
We have to post from week four reading, sounds easy enough right.
Here we go..