Wes Fryer Chapter 1

Wes Fryer Chapter 1

            Seeing teachers as “digital bridges” is a very interesting point.  Teachers need to use a variety of media effectively as a teaching and student tool.  This will help educators to support student efforts to express their knowledge using their diverse multiple intelligences.  To do this, teachers themselves must be familiar with a diverse array of different media technologies.  In order to be more than just consumers of this new media, both students and educators need to play around with it in order to become familiar enough that they can be truly creative in its use. 

            I found the idea of students creating and maintaining a digital portfolio that contained media artifacts they had created to be interesting.  I have saved assignments that I created for different classes for much the same purposes.  I felt they showed examples of my writing skills, or of interesting class presentations, or of artwork I had created.  The idea of a student keeping this kind of work in a portfolio as a demonstration of their knowledge, skills, and accomplishments seems like a good idea to me.

            I was surprised to read that in many locations worldwide, especially in the developing world, mobile computing devices are being chosen for use over both desktop computers AND laptops.  These devices being used include smartphones and cell phones.  I understand their low price helps a lot, but did not realize that mobile computing devices had enough processing power to make them so useful.  While they are often thought of as simply a way to make calls and access the web, there are a lot of apps available that allow them to do much more.  I had thought that laptops were the basic level that people needed to be useful, but that is no longer true.

            I thought the story of the creative ceramics class was interesting.  The idea of students getting a lot of practice that led to great improvement of their skills was very well presented.  It also commented well about the dangers of too much theorizing that is not grounded in real world experimentation.