Adding Technology to the Curriculum

 One of the things that I love in The Socially Networked Classroom: Teaching in the New Media Age, by William Kist, is the fact that there are examples of activities to be conducted in the classroom. As a soon-to-be teacher, or even a teacher in general, it is always nice to have a bag of tricks. I am kind of in the dark on the bag of tricks because I have little experience in the teaching field. Of course I have some ideas that come from my experience of being a student, but by Kist including some activities I can grasp some concepts easier and gain some insight on how to talk about some things with my furture students. Kist provides the examples in various forms which is a perk becasue multimodalality is a huge help in keeping kids involved in the curriculum, and one of the hardest things to do as a teacher, is keeping kids involved. As for the readings in Sara Kajder's Adolescents and Digital Literacies: Learning Alongside Our Students, I found it very interesting that "55 percent of online teens (aged 12-17) self-reported having a profile within a social networking site (18). I guess this isn't really surprising, but it sounds like a large number. Of course, I have had my share of myspace and facebook but I was never inclined to keep up with the technology. My personal experiences are very limited with technology, and sometimes I feel very overwhelmed with the new advances, or even older things for that matter. A lot of the material we are reading in class seems very informational to me becasue I am so unaware of some of the simple things going on in the tech. world. I know that by the end of this class I will have learned a lot of stuff.