Social Justice

In the article Social Justice, by Colleen Swain and David Edyburn it states, “In 1992, the U.S. Department of Labor’s SCANS report noted that at least 80% of all jobs in the next two decades would require workers to be technologically fluent. This means if workers are not well prepared in using technology to succeed in the workplace, they will be forced to take low-paying jobs with limited potential for advancement.” This quote shows us how important it is for our students to be up to date on current technology uses. If they do not have access to advanced technology at home, it is even more important for us to use it in our schools.

This article also echo’s the Engage Me or Enrage Me article we read earlier in the term. Students yearn for their teachers to be using the newest technologies in order to engage them. This requires us to be constantly learning the newest forms of technology and not just use it as teaching tools for our content, but more importantly, teaching them how to use it. We need to get creative with our assignments; if they are doing a summative project on Huck Finn (or anything), they should be required to use technology in their presentation.

I hope to give my students time in the computer lab to work on their projects at school. I also plan to talk to representatives at our state schools and community colleges in order to find out what level they expect their students to be on as far as technology goes. We can’t have a giant disconnect between high school education and college; we need to work on creating the best possible transition for our students. That includes being proficient using the newest technologies and not being afraid of them.

My first week of undergrad, I was assigned a PowerPoint project in my Art and Human Values class. I had not learned how to do PowerPoint in high school. Although I had teachers that used it during their lectures, they did not provide me with the opportunity of creating a PowerPoint presentation myself. I felt I was at a huge technological disadvantage my first week of college and I can’t even imagine how students will feel in the future if they are behind, as technological advances rapidly.

PowerPoint Presentations

My favorite item during the PowerPoint presentations was Stephen’s Jeopardy game. It was extremely interactive and I hope to use his format for my classes (I need to find out how he linked his categories with the questions!) I also really enjoyed Zach’s use of graphs and pictures to explain how lasers worked because I had no idea what the vocabulary meant and I needed the pictures to understand the concepts. Also, any time humor was used (i.e. - James’ funny animal photos, Carries unicorn video, Zach’s laser dinosaurs) was extremely beneficial and engaging. I think any time bits of humor are present it catches the attention of students who may have zoned out previously and they are engaged in the presentation again.

When the presenter reads notes they have in their hand it is really easy to tune out what they are saying. My suggestion for that is to use the slides as reminders or an outline so that you can still make eye contact and keep the students engaged.

After viewing everyone else’s presentations I would improve my presentation by adding more sound bites and using less text in the last slide. I would also love to add in more graphs and pictures but it would depend on what I was presenting, improve doesn’t really lend itself to graphs.

I love using PowerPoint as a lesson presenter but for Drama class, it would very much depend on what I was teaching. Since most of the content in a class like Drama consists of the students “doing,” I would only use this for presentations like theater history or playwright biographies. I would love to use the Jeopardy idea for my Intro to Theater class for theater vocabulary retention. My only ‘con’ of using PowerPoint is that the students are sitting and listening instead of “doing,” but if I could use it in an interactive way like a game show, I think it would be very beneficial.