Journal # 1

"Professors adjust their methods to reach technology-savv generation"
By Eleanor Yang Su

This article was very interesting to me specifically because I am definitely one of those students guilty of typing on my laptop and checking emails during a monotonous lecture. As someone guilty of doing this, and then also as a future educator, I understand just what these teachers are up against. Technology is ever changing and students and teachers are constantly struggling to keep up. With myspace and facebook among other programs used for instant messaging, students are able to multitask during lecture. This semester I am taking a class where there are over 100 students enrolled. In order to keep the students involved in the lecture, our professor has created an interactive classroom with the “clicker system”. Each student buys an electronic device that sends data to the teacher’s main computer via radio waves. This “clicker” allows him to receive immediate responses from each student and since each “clicker” is connected to our student ID, he can also take attendance and see who answers what. I feel that this “clicker system” is a great way to keep the students attention and get their immediate responses to questions.

1.) How can teachers compete? How can a professor REALLY maintain their students attention other than somehow controlling the network the students computers are on??
If a teacher creates an interactive experience in the classroom like my professor does with my large class, I believe that the students will say tuned in to the teacher. In our class, the students can see how many people are logged onto the system and then it’s almost a race to see everyone submit their answers in the allotted 30 answer time. In the worst case scenario, I wonder if it is necessary to somehow block students from specific websites to keep them from getting side-tracked.

2.) Are personal laptops and other new devices a positive or negative thing for the classroom?
I think that these things can be both a positive for enabling individual learning and quick note taking, but they can also be negative when they distract not only the student using them, but also the students around them. Having laptops and such in the class is a great way to get quick answers and familiarize students with the technology out there. It is the student that tunes out and distracts the students around him with his online video game conquests that can be the problem.