Wes Fryer Chapter 1

I found this chapter a little bit hard to follow, because it was hard for me at times to follow his thought process, especially in the beginning. However, I was able to gain some insight from this chapter. I totally agree that some teachers use the excuse of being a “digital immigrant” to not use technology in their classroom. They aren’t comfortable with it, so they avoid it at all costs. I also think that many teachers don’t like technology, and are scared of how fast it is rapidly growing, and they use that as an excuse to not use it. However, what I think these teachers don’t understand, or don’t want to accept is that technology can help students do some amazing things. It is such a powerful learning tool, and it’s okay if you’re not comfortable with it, you will learn along with your students. I agree with Fryer’s argument that visual literacy is important, I believe that giving our students this skill will help them learn better. In my personal experience I have never been one that is able to read too much into photos, and I wish I could. So I think that teaching our students visual literacy through technology will be important. Two other things I really like about this chapter and agreed with were the sections about cell phones as a useful tool, and creativity being a product of technology use. In this day and age almost every high school student has a cell phone, and most often it’s looked at as a distraction in the classroom. However, I believe that we could really make it a useful tool. Taking a student’s cell phone away is just going to make them not want to listen to what you’re trying to teach them. So why not find a way that you can incorporate cellphones in your classroom every once and awhile? I also agreed with Fryer on the fact that we need to play with different types of technology, because with technology and all of its possibilities we could create some great things. Lastly, out of this entire chapter there was only one thing that I did not agree with, and that was the idea of a digital portfolio. I think this would be a great idea if you had all of your students doing all of their work using technology. It’s not such a great idea, however, when it comes to including items that were not done using technology. I have heard of experiences with digital portfolios and it did not work well for the students at all.