I read an article by A. J. Juliani entitled “6 Truths About Technology in Education” and have decided to write a response to three of those truths. This is my opinion on truth number two: Truth #2: “Every child in your class is someone else’s whole world. Technology transforms our social/human connections” (Juliani, 2017).

Having a child in lower elementary school, I really connected with this truth because in so many ways our child is our whole world. Our child changed schools this year, after having quite a bit of difficulty in Kindergarten with bullies and a lack of communication from the school. I learned lots of what I do not want to be like as a teacher through my experiences last year with my own student.  Our new school uses technology to really reach out to parents and keep them involved. We get a weekly newsletter for our classroom that details what they worked on in the last week, showing examples and previews the week to come. We have an active school and class website that is regularly updated with assignments, permission slips and is being expanded to include samples of the works they do in class. Teachers regularly message us through an app that the school uses and respond within 24 hours on school days. I feel connected to my student, the teachers and even classroom community they are building. It feels like every week some new bit of technology is being used to reach out and I love it. I am actually taking notes and keeping copies of things so I have models for my own classroom. I think technology makes it easy to involve families in our classroom communities if we embrace it and dive in headfirst. I know in higher grades that the students take turns helping write the newsletter every week, I think this would be an even cooler idea to expose students to technology and teach them the value of reaching out.

References

Juliani, A. J. (2017, September 10). 6 Truths About Technology in Education. Retrieved October 04, 2017, from http://ajjuliani.com/6-truths-about-technology-in-education/