Late last year, my name was accidently credited to an article I didn’t write. The article in question was by Morgen Snowadzky and focused on how she doesn’t like Moodle and the direction our society is going. Because of the mix-up, I caught hell from several people, one being a technology personel at my school that I know well. While I understand her opinion, I feel it is appropriate to share my opinion on the subject because mine is quite different than hers.
I love technology. I wish there was more of it in the classroom. I miss class a lot due to different school activities I am in. I wish that students were allowed to type notes so that they could easily be emailed to me. Also, I can type fast enough to keep up with what a teacher is saying, so I would never miss a note because I couldn’t write fast enough nor be unable to read my notes later because I was scrambling to get down information. Access to technology during lessons would help me understand something the teacher was saying without interrupting the entire class. For example, if my teacher makes a reference to “Death of a Salesman” and I am the only one who doesn’t get the reference, I could google it and learn that it is a play by Arthur Miller about tragedy happening to the common man, all without interrupting the thought process. I wish we could use chat during class, especially when doing research. If I find a site that could be helpful to someone else, it would be a lot easier to just copy and paste the link into chat than to have them retype a ten-foot long web address. Like Morgen, my teachers have also begun to use Moodle. For my summer reading homework, Moodle was extremely easy to use. It was quite conveinent to type my responses on the site and submit them than to type them up, double space them, add the proper heading, etc. and worry about remembering them for the first day of school. My teacher was thankful for Moodle because he wasn’t given a huge stack of papers the first day to grade. He was able to grade in moderate as we submitted our assignments to the site. In addition to ease, using computers is good for our planet. Now, I am not big on the green movement, but less paper needed saves trees and saves money. Less ink and less paper saves our schools room in the budget, something many schools are looking for right now. I love technology, and though there is no substitute for some things we do in the classroom, we can definately improve our learning with technology.
If you would like to read Morgen’s original article, click here.
