Week 6- Assignment 2, part 1

After reading the articles Middle School Science Teachers’ Confidence and Pedagogical Practices of New Literacies and Using Social Networking Sites to Enhance Teaching and Learning in the Science Classroom, the use of technology in the classroom seems to be not only beneficial but essential. In the first article, the author correlated a teacher's comfort level with icts to the amount of icts integrated into his lessons. The results showed that the more confident a teacher feels about his technological skills, the more technology will be used in his lesson. No one can deny the benefits of incorporating technology into our classrooms. After all, the students of today are deeply embedded in technology and social networking that it would almost be impossible to shy away from this new phenomenon. Yet we do have teachers from the "previous generation" who are not as familiar with social networking and other means of icts and therefore are hesitant to use these helpful learning tools into the classroom. In addition, the use of icts requires a great amount of resources for the students that not every school or child is able to afford. This lack of funding makes it extremely difficult to maximize the uses of icts in schools.
If one were to honestly evaluate these issues, there are a variety of solutions that can be implemented to help the situation. For instance, in regard to the generational gap between teachers and students, teachers can easily be taught the technology by their students. This provides the students with an excellent opportunity to boost their confidence. When doing this however, the teacher has to make sure that his dignity remains intact and that his authority is not undermined. Additionally, in regard to the budgeting issue, if schools would calculate how much money is spent on printed material I believe that the amount of money would be similar to the amount of money needed to invest in the resources needed to properly use icts. Today it is very common to eliminate printed material and use digital books instead. Between kindles, nukes, ipods, ipads, etc. to carry around heavy expensive books are things of the past. Both of these articles carried true information that can deeply impact today's classrooms if the issues above mentioned are addressed.