Spotlight on Emerging Technology 6715

Spotlight on Emerging Technology Presentation:

http://prezi.com/rbs-wjndbf8i/course-management-system/

Anticipation of Colleagues Rebut:

After visiting moodle.com and navigating through the website I realized that for some educators and teachers CMS (Course Management Systems) is a great technology tool to have and use as part of their everyday teaching and learning. But for others who aren’t as technologically savvy, CMS’s are quite intimidating and overwhelming. Teacher’s are already short on time, that some will think that Course Management systems will take up a lot more time that they don’t have.

As I present this presentation to my colleagues I am anticipating a lot of rebut and complaining due to not only time being an issue, but for some of the veteran (older) teachers who aren’t as up to date with technology. What they need to realize is the flexibility and accessibility of CMS’s and Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). With using Course Management Systems and Virtual Learning Environments there are pros and cons.

Some of the pros of using these emerging technologies are having accessibility anytime and anywhere. Students, parents, and teachers will have the ability to sign onto these networks at anytime and navigate and search for whatever information they are looking for. Another pro would be the frequent parent/teacher communication. In today’s busy society the parent involvement is decreasing drastically. Since we are becoming such a 21^st century technology world, more parents are connected to the Internet. Whether its cell phones, email, I-Pads and much more, the parents would rather contact through technology rather than face to face. One of the best attributes about these programs is the increase in participation. Students love getting to spend time on the computer and if we gave them a secure VLE with plenty of material to search through, I really feel as though it will improve the student participation.

Although, I would love to be able to “sell” Course Management Systems and Virtual Learning Environment’s to my colleagues and only have pros to using these networks, there are some cons. I know that for the district we teach in the biggest concern is going to be that a lot of our students don’t have Internet accessibility due to being in a low-income area. What they don’t understand is that the students will always have accessibility to it during the day. I know that doesn’t make it accessible anytime, anywhere, but depending on what the teachers put on these networks the students won’t always need to use them at home. Another con that I am sure my colleagues will rebut is losing face-to-face interaction with parents and students. As much as I would love to agree with them that this is a negative, I truly feel that using these programs will get us further with the parents and have greater communication since technology is such an on- the- go tool.

Teachers, educators, parents and students won’t have any clue how to use these new technological programs unless we teachers who know how to use them teach it. Although I know this won’t be an easy presentation due to the fact that my staff can be hard to “sell” I think that once they play around with it and see what all can be done, they will slowly learn to love the idea.