Throughout my college career, I have been able to get by with the bare minimum as far as technology. I am not on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. Only in the past two years did I get a Pinterest account and yesterday I signed up for the first time on Twitter. Even though my lack of digital knowledge has not been a problem for me, I can already foresee how it will be when I begin my career as a middle or high school teacher. These days, it is not uncommon to find a sixth grader with a smartphone, which for me at that age was not even a thought. As I saw (and continue to see) more students constantly wanting to use technology, I realized that I needed to become more well-versed in things that I previously had no interest in engaging with, as well as useful digital tools, and this is the main reason I am taking this class.
Many of the students I have worked with in my practicums seemed to express little to no interest in history or social studies, and if they did, they were only concerned about getting a good grade in their class. When they would get bored, they would pull out their phones and become, as one of my professors in the College of Education put it, “actively disengaged.” As a future teacher, however, I want my students to be actively engaged, which can be achieved by “connecting the new to the known.” This phrase is one I learned in my education classes and it means to take the preexisting knowledge your students come into your class with and use it to teach them something new. In this case, if I can devise a way to incorporate technology, which is something my students are very familiar with, into my lessons, this will hopefully help keep them more engaged and give them a framework to understand new concepts in history and social studies.
