If you saw in my last post my quest to go back into the classroom as lead me to taking classes in order to clear my credential to teach in California. The class I'm taking now is called, Integrating Technology in the K-12 Classroom. I must say I'm really enjoying this class a lot. It is one of three that I need to clear my credential. Watch out teaching world here I come, ready or not!
When I was teaching in Hawai'i way back in 1993-1997 we were just beginning to incorporate technology into the teaching/classroom environment. I can remember getting my first email address with my district, I felt really excited about it and was amazed how I could now communicate to other educators out of state or within our school not to mention all over the world. Sharing ideas, documents, questions on lessons, you name it can be communicated with the stroke of a few keys on the keyboard and hit send. How easy is that? Plus, if you have a smart phone you can send or check emails anywhere or at anytime. Having said that, there are few negatives with communicating through email. If you send an email and want an immediate response you may not get one right away. I'm guilty of this I usually don't check my emails until later in the day after work or before school. I'm sure when I'm a full-time teacher again I'll be checking my school emails much more frequently. There is a lot of school business or information that is passed around via email to keep everyone informed whether it be that certain forms needs attention ASAP or the fire drill scheduled for that morning. Another thing with emails the writer can be misunderstood, you can not always read the authors feeling or mood in an email. I personally like emails for certain things but now for all of my electronic communications. So what are some others?
Another method of electronic communication is the threaded messages. This type is used on certain forums {education or you name it you can find it forums} and it also has it's positives and negatives to its use. If you belong to a certain educational forum with a variety of topics you can join in on the thread and post comments, get advice or ask questions. You can author you own thread start a discussion. Not all forums everyone has access some you can join and others are more exclusive. The forum in The Blackboard is very beneficial as we can discuss things in our class and or get clarification on a topic. Another negative depending how active the forum is or the thread you may not get your comment answered in a timely fashion. Also if someone replies to your comment you may not know because you won't get notifications, so checking into the thread is essential. It too is great for certain instances but not great for all electronic communication.
A more timely electronic communication is live chat rooms. You can communicate in real-time right then and there. Some planning needs to go into having a live chat because you need to schedule a day and time. Also I think everyone needs to be on board with a topic of discussion and or prepared with questions to guide the discussion. This maybe harder to do because everyone has such busy lives so this may not be as easy. I've never used Skype before but I think that would be the next best thing to being in person. You can "almost" be in the same room because you can visually see the person. Body language can be easily read when using this type of communication. The downfall especially with this type of electronic communication is the hiccups of technology. We have all had the WIFI go out right when we are in the middle of something and that's bound to happen in live chats or while skyping. Sometimes in the live-chats the conversations when typing your "talks" in the speech bubbles it can be going faster or slower than you would like. I would say this is my least favorite form of electronic communications. What is your favorite way to communicate? Are you like my husband he likes the good Ol' pick up the phone. He is very old school and finds all these new forms of communication daunting.
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