FInal Project Written Assignment

I chose to create a class website. As I mentioned, I dabbled in creating a class website a couple of summers ago, but the school year began and it went onto the proverbial back burner. So, when Dr. Bogad assigned this project, it gave me a chance to revisit this. The first article that we read, "The Old Revolution," by Mike Wesch was a bit of an inspiration as to the reason I decided to try to create a class website. His counterargument to Jay Mathews' "The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad" sparked an idea to rather than ignore technology, I needed to find a way to blend traditional and modern learning through technology without compromising content. So, I created a class website through googlesites.

Throughout my years at Rhode Island College, two quotes remained in my mind: "Be a Lifelong Learner" and "A Teacher Needs to Have With-It-Ness." As a digital immigrant teaching digital natives, I feel that if I completely ignored technology, then both of the aforementioned quotes would become defunct in my practice. Then, when Susan Patterson came to speak with our class, she spoke of we being in the midst of a "Cultural Shift," that rivals the societal impact of only the Printing Press, and the Industrial Revolution. So, I asked myself, "If students are learning differently today, than ever before, how can I implement the technological learning styles of today's students into the necessary curriculum content that needs to be taught?" In other words, I need to bridge the gap.
 
Three of our course themes that my creation of a class website incorporate are:

1. Digital Natives(my students) versus Digital Immigrants(me, the teacher)

2. Critical Pedagogy in Today's Public Education (Integrating Traditional and Modernized methods of teaching. Meeting resistance in an ever changing world)

3. Media as an Ideology (Looking at concepts, issues, and/or text through a digital lens in an attempt to learn/analyze).

Not only with my particular project, but with this Media course in general, I was able to charter new waters. Not only did I create a website that I otherwise would not have been able to do, but I was able to build a foundation for both me, as an educator as well as my students as learners. In other words, I learned how to close the gap between me as a digital immigrant and my students as digital natives through the creation of this website. I was given the time to gather digital resources that will be fun and educational for my students, but perhaps more importantly, they can get a sense of what I, as a student in this course was able to get, and that is a chance to be a digital learner in the 21st Century. No matter what age, looking at something through a multidimensional lens is always beneficial as a learner. It allows one to avoid the relationship of Teacher as Know-er and Student as Not Knowing to a more collaborative one.