Week 5: critical thinking and technology can work together or not?

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

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My initial reaction to this article was how possible is to make active and reflective students when integrating technology in the classroom.

Something I learned and that immediately wanted to share with a colleague was that educators should think in terms of teaching students to understand, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate evidence.  But how do we know that our students are learning and how can we eradicate the barrier of Sedentary lifestyle student could have. First of all we do not have to underestimate the ability to reason. In poor counties education is based on memorizing to pass an evaluation discarding any change for learners to analyze the content and go deeper.  We must understand that we should spend our time teaching students how to learn (that is, how to read the text actively and analytically and to think in the same manner) rather than using the classes to dictate information (p.2, Ken Bain).  

Something else I want to emphasis is that our brains love diversity.  Each student is a different world and each of them will process the information in a different way. That is when technology is able to provide unlimited resources to teach in a different way.  By using pictures diagrams, time lines, etc., students are more able to understand concepts. However, we should be clear that technology is just to expose to students different concepts of the reality and at the same time let them to analyze and process the information to produce their own concept of it.

A belief of mine that was confirmed was the use of technology to get through the material faster. Teachers who use visual aid such as PowerPoint presentation (ppp) should not try to cover a complex topic in on single class. Instead, educator could use ppp to give students the opportunity to draw their own conclusions based on videos or pictures in a sequence.  Also, Schools should make more effort to test students using visual media that just asking them to prepare PowerPoint presentations.