Technology+Integration

Hi, you all. For this assignment we were asked to watch some videos from Edutopia, and choose one to answer some questions. These were: why do you like the video? What have you learned from the video regarding technology integration? Then, we were asked to write another paragraph about the importance of technology integration in today's classrooms in your opinion and how you are going to integrate technology into your teaching after you become a teacher (our ideas). Well, this is what I wrote. I really liked this activity. I learned a lot as you will see in my response below. Hope you all like it and leave some comments. = "How to Use YouTube in the Classroom" = = media type="custom" key="6371755" =

The video is titled “How to Use YouTube in the Classroom”, and I liked it because it taught me some details that I didn’t know about using YouTube in a classroom. One of the things I learned was that you can actually embed a YouTube video to show it in your wiki, blog, or website without including related videos. Sometimes these related videos are not so appropriate for students, so it is a relief that you can only embed the video you want. I remember a day when I was doing my field experience in a high school, and the teacher was playing a Youtube video on a blog. When the video was over, all students asked her to play one more related to that, so she just clicked on one of the related videos section, and it came out that this one contained a somewhat sexual content. The teacher stopped the video immediately, and apologized, but the whole class was laughing already. This incident really distracted them from the main point of the lesson. It even distracted me, who was about to laugh too. The other great thing I liked about this Edutopia video is that it let me know about the existence of an educational category in Youtube for teachers and students, YouTubeEDU. This is a revolutionary tool in technology integration because it puts at our disposal the right and necessary educational materials to educate students with motivating and enriching videos.

The importance of technology integration in today’s classrooms is compulsory, vital; without technology integration in today’s classrooms there would be no such thing as education. Today’s world is growing exponentially because of technology and the benefits it brings to our way of life. In order to keep this growth going and us very apt for it, we need to integrate technology in all ways possible in the early stages of education. Technology is undoubtedly how the world works today, therefore it is wise and obvious that school education should reflect that reality in its instruction. Technology brings a new world, a modern world, today’s world; technology reminds students that what they’re learning is not something abstract that they will never use, but something common, necessary, valuable, touchable, real. Once I become a teacher, I will integrate technology in my classroom in many ways. Since I’ll be a Spanish language teacher, I’ll be using many CDs, movies, YouTube videos, Web searching, voice recording, online translators, among others. For example: for an AP Spanish class, I can play some movies and then make my students write a summary, choose one topic out of the many from the movies (e.g., poverty, social class, ignorance, tourism, etc.), and then present it to the class; for a basic Spanish class, after lecturing about the Spanish vowels, I can play a song that sings about the Spanish vowels; for an intermediate Spanish class, I can make my students translate a story from Spanish into English using an online translator; etc. I really enjoy making my students feel motivated when I give a lesson because I firmly believe that motivation is the key to success, and this motivation is achieved greatly by incorporating, integrating technology to classrooms.