Microblogs

Mircoblogs can be very helpful or a waste of time what students. In my experience as a college student having to follow a microblog I love it. I have to follow a psychologist on Twitter and he is always posting and when I write him he always responds. So for me I gain knowledge from his posts and not only his posts but from him personally answering my questions that I ask him. But not every student or teacher who follows microblogs has the same experience that I do. Again going back yo my college classroom setting other students have had to follow psychologists and they hardly post, or retweet, and when ever they ask questions they have never gotten a respond like I have, so what are the students truly learning? I believe if the teacher is going to assign for students to follow a microblog they mst first scope out the blog and see if they are reguarly posting and somewhat engaging with the students.  

Why this Major?

Let me start off by telling a story. When I was a little baby my mother babysat, up until the I went into the first grade. After I went into the first grade she became a paraprofessional in the field of Special Education, she did this for 10 years. a month after my 16th birthday my mother died suddenly from Type A flu in less than 24 hours, and there was nothing I could do to save her. So I was not even thinking of college after that, my thought process was I couldn’t save her so I was going to save as many people as I could. My senior year of high school came around and I had applied to the United States Coast Guard Academy and got in. Well, my body didn’t agree with that because I had knee surgery 6 months before I was going to be shipped off to NC for training, so they had to decline me. I was angry and hurt and mad at God because I thought that was what he wanted me to do, I though he wanted me to save people. I had a lot of down time during my recovery and I began to think about when my mom was alive and I was just a freshman in high school. When I had a home softball game I would have some down time and would go over to the elementary and help her with the special education students in her class, and I loved it. I remember looking at my mother and seeing the joy she had for not only her job but for her students that she was teaching. After she passed I felt like her joy her passion for those students came within me and something came over me and made me realize that I have that same passion. So after all the recovery time and thinking through about changing my plans I decided not only to attend Southwestern Christian University on a softball scholarship, but to make not only my mother and myself happy, but for the future children I will be able to teach and make a difference in their lives.

This is why I choose SCU and even though I did not plan to go to college at first God always has a plan and always will have a plan.

Looking Back

Learning has became more advanced in the years, comparing my education levels in high school to my parents levels of education is somewhat difficult. As a sophomore in high school I was in pre - calculus  and I had no idea what I was doing, as I went to my father for help he told me that those problems he was helping me with are mostly the sames ones from when he was in college. As I have been studying how technology has become more prominent in the classroom, I began to think about that one interaction with my father, "what if he had the technology we have today"? How different the world would be. 

In many of the cases that I have seen the "older" generation (and I use that term loosely) have grown up with a completely different learning style in the children in today's society. We use laptops to take notes, write papers, search for answers we don't know. The parents of this generation are more of the handwriting both notes and papers, and if they didnt know an answer they had to look it up in a book, or go out in the world and find it. in recent polls the "older" generation have not fully accepted the change in the technology.

As I go through my college courses and start to venture into my degree field classes I am having to take an Educational Technology class I can see how much this world as become independent on technology. If you step outside and go to a restaurant what do you see? A couple on a date not taking, just on their phones on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram? That is the normal way of doing things today. Other than no social face to face communication technology can actually be very useful in the classroom.

As an inspiring teacher I have always been afraid of technology in my classroom. I was raised on pen and paper, taking notes by hand, no technology whatsoever. But as I go through this class I am starting to venture out and accept certain technology. One of these programs is blogging! So swhen I was in high school our classes no matter what subject they were we had to keep a journal. We would pass the journal around and read each other stories, when we were done we would write comments on said story and be done with it. Blogging could be a well rounded way to keep everyone doing the say thing but in a better more easy setting.